Web and BeyondCast, the Small Business Digital Marketing and Productivity Technology Show

https://youtu.be/3mtIQhnbCj8 How to Launch a Virtual Summit, or Online Conference, for Small Business How to Launch a Virtual Summit, or Host an Online Conference, for Small Business: Strategy, Tips and Tools to Host a Web-Based Educational Event for your Business – Webinar archive More than any other time in history, we are digitally connected. And, this connectedness to the Internet can also bring people across long distances together. As a Small Business, you can be the hub for such a digital gathering for learning, sharing, and networking. Whereas traditional conferences/summits require travel, hotels and more, the Internet is the new travel-free destination for these unique Web-based events. Are you interested in creating an online conference/summit? Watch this Webinar archive to learn: Why would you want to host an online conference/summit? What are some strategies and tips for getting the most out of an online conference/summit? What tools are to help you create an online conference/summit? If you’d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. In This Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host

https://youtu.be/fxaFUslBQdA Launching Your First Online Course Are you ready to share your knowledge and/or expertise with the world? One of the best ways to add a new product to your business, start a side hustle, or jumpstart a community is through online courses. Online learning is a 107 billion dollar industry and it’s only going to continue growing as more people come online around the world. Come to this Webinar and learn how to launch your first online course for success from the start! In this Web and Beyond Webinar, you’ll walk away with: What do you need to effectively go live with your first, quality online course, How to market your course before, during and after its launch so you get above the noise, and Tips and tricks for pricing, planning your content and building your community around your course. This Webinar, as part of W3C Web Services’s Web and Beyond Webinars series, presented by Digital Marketing Strategist Ray Sidney-Smith, Google Small Business Advisor for Productivity, Evernote Regional Leader for North America, author of SoLoMo Success: Social Media, Local and Web Small Business Marketing Strategy Explained (2014), and Community Host of Web and Beyond Community (https://www.webandbeyond.community), a digital community of business owners learning and sharing how to market and managed on the Web and beyond. If you’d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. In This Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host

https://youtu.be/JSw5sIF4sMg How to Create an Affiliate Program for your Small Business (This and the next couple of podcast episodes are replays of some of our more popular Webinar topics. We’ve got all new podcast episodes coming soon, so stay tuned!) If you’re a Small Business, the idea of hiring a salesforce is typically not in the budget. You wear many of the hats needed to run the business, including Director of Sales & Marketing, and you depend on word-of-mouth referrals primarily to support your business. That said, there’s a huge opportunity left on the table thanks to the Web today when it comes to sales–affiliate programs–whether you sell products or services. Every affiliate you have join your business has minimal upfront costs and then you can multiply your sales team to your business’s needs. In this Webinar, we covered: Best-practices for developing an online affiliate program for your Small Business (so you need to have a website for this to work, although this could work in an offline capacity as well); Tools your Small Business can use to setup a fast and easy affiliate program; and, Techniques for getting affiliates attracted to be an affiliate, on-boarded to your affiliate platform, and supported for a successful affiliate program for your business. If you’d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. In This Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. See Full Show Notes Here.

https://youtu.be/uR56qNHIeZg Small Business Social Networks Updates, May 2021 Edition – Web and Beyond Live Each week, President of W3 Consulting and Managing Director of W3C Web Services (https://web.w3cinc.com/) Ray Sidney-Smith broadcasts live to update you on the latest small business digital marketing and business productivity technology updates you need to be effective. Once a month, Ray collects together all the updates to the major and upcoming social networks and share those in this Small Business Social Networks Updates episode so we release that here in the Web and BeyondCast also. Enjoy! (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://w3cinc.com/6957/social-media-updates-may-2021/ for clickable links and the full show notes for this cast.) If you’d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. See full Show Notes here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsidognv2bM President Removed From Social Media Platforms, CARES Act…Act 2, and More – Web and Beyond Live – January 11, 2021 Each week, President of W3 Consulting and Managing Director of W3C Web Services (https://web.w3cinc.com/) Ray Sidney-Smith broadcasts live to update you on the latest small business digital marketing and business productivity technology updates you need to be effective. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://webandbeyondcast.com/ for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) If you’d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. All the platforms that have banned or restricted Trump so far – Axios  EXPLAINER: Can social media companies boot Trump? Yes  How Trump is Losing his Social Media Platforms – The New York Times  Parler is down, making Trump’s search for online outlet even tougher – CBS News  Terminating Service for 8Chan  Social media app Parler goes dark as Amazon, Apple and Google pull support – YouTube  Summary of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 | National Credit Union Administration  Elon Musk launches SpaceX Starlink internet in the UK – Business Insider Join Web and Beyond Community!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am6yWXWy9QA SquareSpace Member Areas, YouTube Shorts, and Facebook Marketing Strategy Discussed – Web and Beyond Live – December 7, 2020 Each week, President of W3 Consulting and Managing Director of W3C Web Services (https://web.w3cinc.com/) Ray Sidney-Smith broadcasts live to update you on the latest small business digital marketing and business productivity technology updates you need to be effective. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://webandbeyondcast.com/ for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) If you’d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Fed chair Jerome Powell: Many small businesses remain at risk of going out of business this winter – YouTube Black Friday hits record $9B in US consumer spending | Fox Business Walmart scraps shipping minimum for subscription service in move to take on Amazon – CNN WhatsApp is expanding fast and catching up with WeChat | Fortune Squarespace adds paywalls to help online businesses monetize Building YouTube Shorts, a new way to watch & create on YouTube MeWe Stories are Here! – Lady L’s Designs + 7 Steps to an Effective Facebook Marketing Strategy | Sprout Social Join Web and Beyond Community!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am6yWXWy9QA All the Stories! (From Snapchat Stories to Twitter Fleets) &#8211; Web and Beyond Live &#8211; November 23, 2020 Now that every major social network has a Stories format, plus Google has launched Web Stories for WordPress, I spent this Web and Beyond Live describing the differences among the various Stories formats. Each week, President of W3 Consulting and Managing Director of W3C Web Services (https://web.w3cinc.com/) Ray Sidney-Smith broadcasts live to update you on the latest small business digital marketing and business productivity technology updates you need to be effective. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://webandbeyondcast.com/ for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. The world’s largest retailer believes shopping has changed forever: Morning Brief&#160; Apple Reduces App Store Commissions to 15% for Small Businesses Starting Next Year &#8211; MacStories&#160; Apple Podcasts launches new embeddable web players for shows and episodes &#8211; 9to5Mac&#160; Small Business: Owning the Future &#8211; The New York Times&#160; Join Web and Beyond Community! Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360aaa42" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360aaa42" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360aaa42" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360aaa42" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:09 Hello, everybody, and welcome to web and beyond live. This is November 23 2020. I&#8217;m Ray Sidney-Smith, President of W three consulting and managing director of WCC web services, which provides affordable WordPress, hosting, as well as web hosting and domain name registration services for small business. My goal each week is to come to you and talk about digital marketing and productivity technologies that help you market and manage on the web, mobile, social media and beyond. And today, what I&#8217;d like to do is I&#8217;d like to cover some just quick news. And then jump into a topic that I&#8217;ve been getting a lot of questions about, and that are stories, the whole format of stories, kind of how stories work, and so on, and so forth. So I wanted to just talk a little bit about the particulars of stories, and how that can be useful to you in your business, and kind of some productivity tips for being able to create stories faster and better, especially especially as I start to think about stories more myself in my own business. So let&#8217;s talk about some of the news, I wanted to cover just a quick few items that I think are going to be important to you going into the next few months. One is that Yahoo Finance recently put out, and they had a video where they were talking about the fact that Walmart put out their recent third quarter earnings results. And they noted something very important in the report, they talked about how resilient consumers have remained throughout this particular season, related to the pandemic and responding to the pandemic. Now, Walmart has made tremendous inroads in terms of making sure that they were amping up their walmart.com digital presence. And so their digital retail experience is, is just really blown up for them. They&#8217;ve also worked on making sure that their their in store systems are matched up with their curbside delivery functions. So I&#8217;m sorry, curbside pickup functions. So you&#8217;re capable of doing more curbside pickup, and just kind of streamlining those operations. And it&#8217;s really interesting, because the CEO was making a note, in essence, to say that they&#8217;re not changing, they don&#8217;t think that human consumer habits are going to shift all that much post pandemic. And the reason I bring this up is that I think it&#8217;s really important for us all to take heart to the fact that we&#8217;re doing all of this work, I hope, I hope you&#8217;re doing all of this work to get your digital experience up and running. This is not just retail, by the way, service business as well as product and otherwise, you need to start thinking about your digital experience. Because the big box retailers are thinking that consumers are have seen a permanent shift in the way in which they&#8217;re going to be buying, which is that they want both, they want the retail experience, and they want the digital experience. And they want the hybrid approach to be able to do that type of buying you as a small business owner need to have parity there. And today, the technology really gives you the capability of doing that at an affordable rate and at a streamlined workflow process. So you can do it. So do not think that you can&#8217;t do it. And if there&#8217;s anybody out there who thinks they can do it, and wants to ask me questions about that, feel free to do so. And I&#8217;ll be happy to go ahead and, Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:30 and help out. So the point is, is that you are capable of doing this? And and it seems like consumers want it. And so we shouldn&#8217;t, we shouldn&#8217;t forget that. Okay, so just that was just a really, really interesting point that I think we all need to take into account that this this change is permanent. And Walmart, if Walmart thinks the permanent change is happening, I would pretty much take that into account. Because you know, Walmart is doing a lot more market research than we are. And they&#8217;re paying, they&#8217;re getting a whole lot more data than we are in terms of things. And they&#8217;re they&#8217;re understanding that. Okay, just a couple quick other news items. One is, Apple has made a really interesting kind of announcement. Apple has a small business section for their developers. And in their Apple Small Business program. They have the app, the app, what they call the App Store, small business program. And this is just important for those of you who do work in technology and are developing applications on the apple ecosystem. And that also means that if you have intentions of ever launching an app on the Apple Store or the Apple App Store, this is something that you should pay attention to also and don&#8217;t think Oh no, never me. I would never launch anything on the Apple App Store. Because mobile applications are also really easy to launch. Nowadays there are applications that help you build those mobile applications and you can do it too do not think that you can and but in line with that. Apple has basically announced they normally take 30% of Any purchase that&#8217;s made through the Apple App Store, they have reduced that to 15% for any business that earns under $1 million per year. So that would be the majority of us. And in terms of app revenues, and if you are making more than that fantastic. But the idea here is that for those who are under that amount, you&#8217;re able to go ahead and now reduce the commission that you&#8217;re paying to Apple by half down to that 15% point, which is just phenomenal. And it&#8217;s it&#8217;s also still an egregious amount of money that Apple is taking. But the reality is, is for what they&#8217;re doing, I can understand the justification for that in some way, shape, or form. And hopefully, there&#8217;s more reform over time, and everybody can make money in the Apple App Store ecosystem. Kind of the same thing happens in the Google Play Store. Google also takes its commission. So that&#8217;s just what it Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:53 is. Okay, next up on staying in line with Apple. Apple has recently announced that Apple podcasts will now be able to have embeddable players and put embeddable web web players for shows and episodes, which means that you&#8217;ll now be able to go into the podcasts Connect, which they&#8217;re now calling, maybe iTunes Connect, I can ever remember what they&#8217;re renaming this thing to every day. But in essence, when you go to the Apple website, you can go to the podcast if you have a podcast, and you can find the embeddable players that you can now embed on your own websites. This is incredibly powerful, because a lot of people still listen, you know, a lot of people still listen to our podcast via Apple podcasts. And, and now you can embed those players directly on your website, giving access to the Apple podcast ecosystem, and therefore, you know, reducing your overhead in terms of having to connect people to that platform. Last but not least, is a section on the New York Times website. And they&#8217;re calling this owning the future. And I just wanted to bring everybody&#8217;s attention to this new york times section on their website. And it has a whole bunch of really interesting articles. And one of those articles is all about how to, you know, gain access to some of the programs that are being provided to small businesses now that the PPP and idle loans are, you know, kind of ending and we don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s going to be happening with regard to some of the other functions within the cares act that have been supporting small business, we don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s going to happen between now and January. And certainly after January, once the new administration comes into the White House, we&#8217;re just not sure. And so this section on the website has given some resources, I&#8217;m going to link that to if you go to WCC inc.com. And so if you, if you go to our website, at the top, you&#8217;ll see the COVID-19 resources, I&#8217;m going to link to this there so that you have access to that. But also note that here, it has some really interesting things on businesses that are pivoting and how they&#8217;ve been pivoting. They have some interesting resources, like I said, and other ways that you can support some other small businesses. And so if you want to, you can look at that article, right, there are nine ways to support small businesses, that article itself are really ways in which you can now create some social content to let your audience know how they can support your business. So really, I think it&#8217;s just really critical right now to kind of review all these resources, know what you can do, and it&#8217;s going to help you generate some content. I will be writing about a lot of these nine ways, in the coming weeks. And I just think it&#8217;s really important that people are aware of them, just know that that it is there. And it&#8217;s really greater than New York Times to have created this owning the future kind of section. And one of the other items that I noted in kind of like the all the various businesses that have done this, all of them have leaned on technology in order to be able to make this happen. They all have beefed up their digital experience. They&#8217;ve accessed mobile applications and the the gig worker economy apps, all of them are using technology to be able to shore them themselves up during this period. And I found it even more fascinating that in one particular business, there was a restaurant business that was a restaurant tour that was talking about her struggles. And of course, she&#8217;s using grubhub, and doordash, and all these other websites. But guess what, she doesn&#8217;t have a website. And so this restaurant that is struggling, doesn&#8217;t have a website, and they don&#8217;t control their own future because they&#8217;re beholden to all of these gig worker economy apps. And as I noted last week, regarding doordash, you know, doordash, and Uber and the rest of them, they just want to replace the humans with technology. And once they can do that they will, which of course is going to have a tremendous impact on our economy. And so we keep giving money to these people on both ends, right. The businesses are paying them to be able to do deliver delivery. And on the on the consumer end. We&#8217;re paying for delivery. And we just keep giving money to this technology companies who in essence, are not supporting small businesses, you know, they&#8217;re in essence want to make sure that they can continue their kind of control over the ecosystem. But they are not pro business. They are not pro small business, they are pro their own businesses. And so I just wanted to make sure everybody was kind of aware of that. Okay. Raymond Sidney-Smith 10:18 With that out of the way, what I wanted to do was to talk about stories. The stories formats have really been around since 2013, in terms of technology. But of course, stories have been around since the age since the dawn of the age of humankind. In essence, we navigate the world through story. There&#8217;s a reason why stories are so embedded in our kind of fabric of being. And that is because we understand we understand both the world around us in terms of narrative. And we remember things better in terms of narrative. And it&#8217;s really important for us to really get at the fact that technology is supposed to support humankind. It&#8217;s not taking us away from our, our biological existence, it is supposed to support and extend our biological experiences. And in so many ways, we keep forgetting that. And then when we look at the the travails of technology, the things that we think technology are not doing well, for us, it&#8217;s because we&#8217;re trying for it, we&#8217;re trying to reject the parts that make us human, the parts that make us humane, the parts that make us better. And what I really want to enforce is this notion of using in technology, the stories format, to be able to extend the brand into being more human being more humane, and helping people be better. So that&#8217;s what stories are all about is about this idea of connecting across as I frequently talk about these technologies like social media and social networks, and blogs, podcasts, and video channels, and so and so forth. this live stream itself on web and beyond live, nothing, nothing, not all of these are nothing more than an extension, a digital bridge between me and you, I get to talk to you one to one across vast distances in real time, right now, those who are listening on the podcast whenever you&#8217;d like. And I can do all of that because of technology, right? I&#8217;m still a human, you&#8217;re still human, unless the AI is listening, and Hello there. But the reality is, is that this is for us, this is for us humans. And we need to remember that we&#8217;re creating this content for other humans, there&#8217;s a heart and mind on the other end of every communication that we are creating online. And and so when we&#8217;re doing that, we need to remember that humans react and respond well to stories. So with that in mind, stories, as I said, came into being thanks to a company called Snapchat at the time now snap, Inc, and their ephemeral messaging application, Snapchat, now Snapchat back then was on iOS only. Now, of course, it&#8217;s available on both major mobile platforms, as well as web interface that has some limited functions. And essence, what I want to do is walk you through how these features work, and, and then some of the various details about them. And I am in the process, actually, of building out a stories story using the most, at least one of the latest iterations of the stories format. And and so hopefully, by the end of this week, I will have that put together, and I&#8217;m gonna actually put together a stories tutorial on how to use that inside of Google Web stories, so that everybody can kind of learn about it. I think, Robin, from start to grow with Hi, Robin, if you&#8217;re watching, I had, she had requested some more information on Google Web stories. And I recognize that it can be a little bit difficult for people to understand that. So I wanted to do just a quick video to build that out for folks and help them understand that better better. So I will put that out it will be in two parts. One will be kind of strategy on one side. And then the other part will be on how to actually set up a Google Web stories story in the system. Okay, so first, as I said, Snapchat, Snapchat launched in October 2013. And and as you may or may not be aware, stories themselves are really designed for a vertical or portrait, most people call it a portrait format, right? And so while I don&#8217;t have much to show you on screen, I may show you a couple of the items here. I just want to explain to you how these, these work. So first and foremost, there is the sizes so stories come in both the normal user feed, you can also run story ads through Snapchat so they have the story format in the ad Raymond Sidney-Smith 14:47 format as well. They are typically 1080 by 1920. And and this is kind of my first tip here, which is that 1080 by 1920 seems to be the standard size across most of the platforms. The The outlier being Pinterest. But the the point in creating the story format. And that, that I think it&#8217;s a 916 ratio, that that whole format concept helps you in streamlining your stories creations, creating the various backgrounds or the stories themselves in tools like Canva, or an Adobe Spark, or inside of the Adobe Creative Suite, you might be using InDesign or something like that Photoshop or otherwise, the goal, of course, is to reduce the amount of work necessary to get these generated, we use Canva at W three consulting and WC web services, and absolutely love it. And we use the Instagram story, sizing that as the template, so we just use that 1080 by 1920 format. And it&#8217;s just pretty easy for us to be able to create all the other stories to be able to get there. And so store. Robin is saying yes, I&#8217;m so excited, you were telling us more about stories. Yes, stories are a fantastic format, and are really, really powerful in terms of getting in front of folks. And so with Snapchat continuing 1080 by 1920, you can post photo and video, video can be up to 10 seconds in length. And this really ends up being important across all of these systems to understand that certain stories, photos, understandable, there&#8217;s just a size and then you can add all kinds of various features to them, like stickers and pins and hash tags, and so on and so forth. On top of overlaying that content on top of them, you can create some content in, say Canva. But then some content actually needs to be created once you upload it to the platform for for being able to push. So the video, of course, then you have that limit of how much video is going to be shared. So you have to be able to set up your video stories to understand, okay, is this video going to be three minutes in length, and therefore I&#8217;m gonna have to chop it up for Snapchat in 10 second increments for Facebook or Instagram Stories Am I going to have to cut that to some other, you know, lengthen, in this case, 15 seconds for Instagram and Facebook. And so kind of considering all of those pieces before you get into the format really helps you create these things more streamlined. Okay, so that brings us to Instagram, Instagram, launched the stories format in 2010, October of 2010. So October 2013. It says no. So Snapchat was was first to the market with with stories. So I got my little research here wrong. I&#8217;ll fix that in my actual stories that I&#8217;ll do later. But either way, Instagram brought up brought out Instagram Stories after Snapchat. They&#8217;re also recommended 1080 by 1920 P. And this is the first time I&#8217;m seeing a limitation with roughly 20 stories posts per day. Okay, so 20 stories per day are available. And of course, they allow photo and video video up to 15 seconds in length. This is in contrast, of course to livestream and igtv posts. So Instagram allows for multiple types of video posts, you can have a video post in the normal video post perspective, then you have video stories, and that&#8217;s the stories post. Then you have live stream, which can be up to 60 minutes in length. And then finally you have igtv posts. And those videos are designed again, portrait also designed for portrait mode as well. And those can be between 15 seconds and 10 minutes in length. So you have some some variety there in terms of the various types of videos provided on Facebook, almost very similarly situated in terms of the 1080 by 1920 P. And in many ways, if you pair your Instagram and Facebook page together, you can post directly to both of those at the same time when you post them to Instagram. So you can open up the Instagram app. And it&#8217;ll it&#8217;ll have both Instagram and Facebook icons overlapping, you&#8217;ll just be able to press that button and push them to both of them at that time. All right, then we have Pinterest. Pinterest is the latest folks to the to the market. They launched their version in 2020. So Facebook Raymond Sidney-Smith 19:23 brought theirs out Facebook stories in March 2017. But Pinterest is the second to latest the penultimate stories format for the major social networks. And they launched in September 2020 in beta and it&#8217;s still only available, I believe, to a limited number of users. So you&#8217;ll have to check on Pinterest. But if you have a business account, you&#8217;d have to have a business account. So Pinterest business account, it&#8217;s free, it&#8217;s easy to set up but you do have to have a business account. These are available to you. Now this is where it&#8217;s strange. You are allowed to do photos video and what I understand is text and I have don&#8217;t have a Pinterest stories, story pins option yet in my interface, so I&#8217;m looking forward to seeing it myself. So I don&#8217;t know what text means as a post, but they&#8217;re saying that you&#8217;re capable of posting text. But either way, I&#8217;m going to stick to photos and video. And then you can also have up to 20 pages per day in terms of story. So in case I haven&#8217;t said this already, all of the stories, stories formats, except for Google Web stories, which I&#8217;ll talk about later, basically post the stories format for 24 hours on your profile. And then they become unavailable to users, they they are still available to you as the publisher, you can see them in the back end, but you won&#8217;t be able to see them in the front end. But if you were visiting the page, now, what&#8217;s unique about Pinterest is that their stories formats are 900 by 1600 pixels. So very different in terms of sizing, what I recommend is to kind of recognize the fact that they they want these stories, pins to basically be really long to stand out from the others that are the other Pinterest posts that are out there, because Pinterest posts are typically portrait anyway. So that&#8217;s just a very interesting length. I don&#8217;t know if I&#8217;m going to really be paying much attention to that or working to make stories specific to that sizing. Maybe if you know, I&#8217;ll set up maybe a size in Canva. So I can just duplicate the post, you know, and create those size pins. And if it looks good, I&#8217;ll do it. If not, I&#8217;m not going to really worry about it. Obviously, if Pinterest is an important platform for you, you want to pay attention to that. Also, story pins allow users people who are viewing the story pins to comment, as well as add photos to story pins. That&#8217;s also very unique functionality here that you can actually comment and add photos to the story pins. Okay. Next, then the last one into the market, which is Twitter. Before we get into web stories, on Twitter launched fleets, fleets are their stories, post format that they recently launched. And they are again ephemeral story posts, they last for 24 hours on a Twitter account. It got lit up last week. And and I got access to it. They were testing it a few months ago, I might I might have mentioned this on web and beyond live that they had been testing this in several other countries and seeing how it worked, they finally have rolled it out to all users. So if you see the update in your application, you will now see a row of circles and profile images, yours being the first one with a plus sign on it. And now that allows you to be able to push those fleets. So fleets are different than tweets. In the sense they show up there at the top of the app, the pop top of the application, their mobile only. And again 1080 by 1920 pixels is the typical recommended size. You can push out photos, videos up to 30 seconds in length. So if you have a video that&#8217;s longer than that, you have to break those clips up into 32nd increments. And so again, you know, the the idea here is 10 seconds for Snapchat, 15 seconds for Instagram, Facebook, and then we jump down to fleets now at 30 seconds. So giving you a little bit more time there. And then Twitter fleets give you photos, videos up to 30 seconds and then tweets as well. So you can actually share a tweet similar to the way in which Instagram allows you to be able to share a an Instagram post. So you can share a post and you can share other Instagram Stories if you&#8217;re mentioned in them into your own stories feed. Well, Twitter allows you to be able to take a tweet and put them out there. What&#8217;s unique about fleets again, they last for 24 hours, but you can actually push out an unlimited number of fleets in a 24 hour period. So others are capping you out It seems Snapchat doesn&#8217;t seem to be a cap. I&#8217;m not quite sure what the actual cap on on Snapchat is. But it&#8217;s pretty high. But in terms of Twitter fleets, Raymond Sidney-Smith 24:06 you can in essence, replicate all the tweets for the day in your fleets. You can replicate other people&#8217;s tweets in your fleets. So I&#8217;ve been testing that, you know, I have a lot of different Twitter accounts. And so I&#8217;m able to now fleet those tweets from those other accounts to my primary accounts. And that&#8217;s really quite convenient because now I can I can are both retweet them for folks who are kind of reading the feed. But then I can also put them up in fleets when people want to kind of get a review of their day. They I can take the most important ones and then fleet them and that way they&#8217;re available up there at the top for folks to know that they&#8217;re important to me for them to see. Okay, last but not least, our Google Web stories. These launched originally in beta as were called amp stories, the accelerated mobile pages format that Google pioneered. And so it&#8217;s February 2018. But only in the last few months has Google actually push these out in a format that everyday users could actually create everyday publishers could create. And that was through WordPress, WordPress powers, a third of the world&#8217;s websites. So it made a lot of sense for Google to partner with them. But this is actually part of a much larger play that Google is making. And of course, like any product Google makes, they could sunset and get rid of this in our in a heartbeat. But I don&#8217;t think they they&#8217;re going to and this is, this is the reason for it. Google Web stories is, in essence, a democratized format for stories. I&#8217;m hoping that over time, that many more platforms start to accept and adopt and adapt the stories format into their own web platforms. So maybe Squarespace and Shopify and Wix and Weebly and the rest, hopefully, all of them are working with Google to become partners to be able to use this web stories format. In essence, it gives a web stories format that doesn&#8217;t require a mobile application, a social network to access those stories, you can access them now across the web. And Google, of course, is indexing those and showing them in their properties that is google.com, on mobile, in their discovery in their Google News apps. And otherwise, this is very, very powerful, because Google really powers most of, of web today, powers web search. And when you go to search for something, you go to Google and you find things that way. And now you&#8217;ll be able to find these stories embedded in them. stories in the web stories perspective, only available for you to use, if you have a WordPress website right now, again, as I said, 1080 by 1920 is kind of that magic, size, photos and videos up to 60 seconds in length for videos. So again, now we go from that, you know, 10 seconds at minimum, all the way up to 60 seconds at the maximum in the in the web stories perspective, you must include captions if you&#8217;re doing video, by the way. So it gives you the ability to provide captions, and what do I always say what&#8217;s good for web accessibility is good for Google. And what&#8217;s good for Google, it&#8217;s good for small business. So if you were, you know, had that in mind, now, when you upload a video of up to 60 seconds, you can place captions underneath those videos, and provide those captions so that greater accessibility means greater indexing. And greater indexing means you get seen by more people. So you can put captions on there, really good on them for focusing on web accessibility. Google&#8217;s always usually good about that. Of course, this means that you are gaining the traffic directly on your website, because you are self hosting the web host web stories, web stories are on your page. That also means that you&#8217;re not capped at the number of stories that you can provide in the system, they of course, recommend in the same range that most of the other platforms do between 10 and 20. various stories in the side of the story. But the difference between web stories is that web stories are a permanent fixture, they don&#8217;t Sunset over after 24 hours, anything like that, they&#8217;re on your website, you can embed them as what&#8217;s called a block inside of WordPress, and embed them in many different places around your own website. Other folks, other people who have WordPress websites can embed your stories on their websites as well, they won&#8217;t look as pretty but they can do it. And and so the vast extension and distribution of web stories is actually quite powerful. So not only for SEO, because like I said, web stories don&#8217;t just disappear after 24 hours like they do on all the other platforms. They are enduring there, they stay around. And so it&#8217;s really important for you to keep that in mind as you make your way forward in terms of that. So Google Web stories, Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:48 I am going to, like I said, be creating a an all the stories story on WCC inc.com, and I&#8217;m going to post it there for folks to be able to see I&#8217;ll put a link to that under the video once it&#8217;s done. And that way people can check it out and see kind of what it&#8217;s all about and why it&#8217;s all you know what some of the pieces are there, so that you can kind of quickly reference it. And, and what&#8217;s really interesting about the web stories function is that you can actually link dissimilar to the other platforms where you have to have so many followers and so many different requirements. With web stories, you can link to various blog posts and other content of yours around the web. So web stories gives you this extension for being able to do that. Now I wanted to make a couple of notes here regarding how web stories are created and how they&#8217;re different from other platforms, and how that might be useful to you. So first and foremost, web stories are designed so that you upload the background images and the images that you&#8217;re using from the media library within your WordPress Media Library installation. And so you have to use those pieces and then apply text and any other items like gifts or gifts to the platform. Afterwards, so you&#8217;re applying that inside the web stories application. And then and then doing that, that being the case, you want to be able to create your stories in the tool that you&#8217;re using, and, and then export them in phases. So if you&#8217;re doing photos, for example, you would create those and then upload the background. But at the point the background is created, whatever images and background images, you&#8217;re going to use, export that first put that into web stories, and then continue building the the stories for any of the other platforms, whether that be Instagram or otherwise, if you don&#8217;t want the text to be text that you&#8217;re creating in the mobile application upon going ahead and, and pushing it out. So like, you wouldn&#8217;t place hashtags in the image in the Instagram stories, or Facebook stories or otherwise, because you want those hashtags to be created. in the, in the Instagram interface, when you&#8217;re launching them, because you want those to be indexed by Instagram for people to be able to find the hashtags, find the people that you&#8217;re tagging in those story posts and otherwise. So you&#8217;re creating these things in kind of different stages and steps. So you have to kind of get that checklist together. And I&#8217;m thinking about that myself in terms of creating a checklist, if I do, I&#8217;ll be certain to share it in somewhere around here on the interwebs. For you. But the the concept then is that once you get into the stories format, you then apply and overlay all of the various components, whether that be uploading video, and or text and linking to content, like, you know, if you wrote a blog post on the topic, you put that blog post in there. Now what I&#8217;m thinking about when I&#8217;m thinking about stories is let me create the stories, especially in the web stories now perspective, let me create the web stories content, and link to content that is valuable to other folks. And then over time, if the stories, that particular web story becomes more popular, then I&#8217;m going to write the content that I think is most valuable for people and then replace it inside of the web story, because you have control over modifying it over time. And so if I want to, I could write the all the stories, you know, web story right now, and link to various articles across the web that talk about the various platforms, and then write blog posts that are associated with them. Or I can record videos and tutorials and that kind of thing. And over time, replace those in the story, add new story pages, you know, into the various stories, and basically make it more valuable over time, which of course tells Google all the right things, this is a story, the story has been refreshed, the story has a new value being added to it, which will of course make it more valuable from a search engine optimization perspective. So that&#8217;s really important for people to kind of take, you know, take to heart when you&#8217;re doing that. Okay, just a couple of quick reminders. As we close up on this conversation, if you have any questions, of course, feel free to post them, tweet at me, leave a comment on the video. And I&#8217;ll be happy to run through those. We are hosting a wide variety of different events coming up. And so I just wanted to let everyone know about some of those. They&#8217;re all available. If you go to our website at W three w the number three c i NC comm forward slash events, and you&#8217;ll be able to go ahead and find those. So first and foremost, we have our last roundtable of the year, that&#8217;ll be on December 1. So you know, and is that next week? Now? It&#8217;s I don&#8217;t know the date. Either way, Raymond Sidney-Smith 33:31 I think it&#8217;s I think it&#8217;s the next week or the week after. And so on 12 one, which will be Tuesday. So today is the 23rd. So Tuesday, the first Yes, next week, Tuesday. At noon, we&#8217;ll be hosting our final our roundtable of the year, we&#8217;ll be talking about planning for 2021 and discussing those elements. So if you want to go to W three c i nc.com forward slash events, and go ahead and find those events there. We&#8217;re also doing a webinar. I&#8217;m trying to find my notes. Sorry, I lost my notes here. We&#8217;re, there we go. We have a Oh, so we just started the weapon beyond webinars. And those are my twice monthly webinars that I&#8217;ll be doing on a variety of different topics. Those are a longer format, a little bit more strategy and tutorial based ones. And they&#8217;re going to cover a wide variety of topics. And one that I just did was on Google workspace for small business. So if anybody&#8217;s interested in learning more about the Google Productivity Suite, and how you can use that for marketing and managing your business, you can go ahead and check out the Google workspace for small business. We&#8217;re going to be doing a whole series of redos of other webinars that I&#8217;ve done to update them to the Google workspace interface now. So I&#8217;ll be going over Google sites and Google Drive and Google Calendar and Google, you know, Gmail, all kinds of other tools over the course of next year on 12 three, which is the third next Thursday, after our roundtable on Tuesday on Thursday. I&#8217;ll be doing my annual small business digital marketing in 2021, basically, my urine review, you&#8217;re in preview episode show. And so I&#8217;ll be covering all the various pieces of trends that have been happening in the marketing world. So you can go ahead and check that out. I&#8217;ll on 1217, then do our final web and beyond webinar of 2020, which will be lessons from a year going live. In essence, I wanted to talk through, you know, all the things that I learned from going ahead and doing this live every week. And with all of the warts and all, there has been such really great pieces of of doing this, and some parts that I think I could do better. And as well, I&#8217;m looking forward to, you know, growing this, this weapon beyond live as we go into 2021. And I wanted to kind of educate folks on some of the things that I learned and sharing those along the way. Robin is noting that she loved this episode. Thanks, Robin. And as a beginner on this subject, she&#8217;ll be rewatching this episode a few times. And so she was thanking me, you&#8217;re welcome. And she can&#8217;t wait for the story on stories, and loves the idea of the checklist. All good things, Robin, thank you. Thank you. And thank you. And you&#8217;re welcome. And I hope to get that together as soon as I can. Also everybody, if you need to, you can check out if you want to, you can check out our new community at web and beyond dot community, make sure you use the www www dot web and beyond community that will take you to the community, all the events that I noted earlier, also embedded there. So if you&#8217;re a member of the community, you can just RSVP RSVP to many of these events directly in there. I think the webinars do require you to register an event right notwithstanding. So we have some centralization of the webinar pieces, but you can see all of the events and add them to your calendar from there. Quick note, I&#8217;m only going to do this a few more times. But healthcare.gov still has open enrollment, if you don&#8217;t have insurance, and you&#8217;re looking for insurance, or if you&#8217;re trying to get insurance for employees or otherwise, where you don&#8217;t provide insurance for them. Because of the size of your business, go ahead and get open enrollment applications in. I think it&#8217;s through 1215 that they&#8217;re open. So you can go ahead and get health coverage for 2021 and healthcare.gov. And just you know, this is a tough time for everybody. And as I keep saying each week, it&#8217;s important for us all to be helping each other. So spread the word that healthcare.gov is still open and active and working and everybody should be, you know, getting themselves insured. With that. That brings me to the end of my time with you all today. And if you enjoyed the livestream, please click the thumbs up icon that helps us bring new small business friends into the fold. And so thank you for doing that. You have a question leave a comment. You can tweet or message me via at W three w the number three consulting on Twitter. And we&#8217;re back here Monday, every week at 11am. Eastern. And thanks so much for sending this weapon beyond live with me. I&#8217;m Ray Sidney-Smith on behalf of W three Consulting and our subsidiary, WCC web services. Have a great week ahead marketing and managing your small business on the web and beyond. Take care everybody.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI_38GRvBuA How to Find Your “Perfect Fit” Franchise with Franchise Coach Faizun Kamal Our first interview with franchise coach Faizun Kamal in &#8220;Is a Franchise Right for You? What Can You Learn From Franchising? With Faizun Kamal&#8221; (Episode 014) discussed how to determine if franchise entrepreneurship is good for you or others you are meeting with. In this interview, we discuss Faizun&#8217;s six-step process she describes in her book, The Right Franchise for You, for choosing the best franchise when you&#8217;re looking to start your own small business. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://webandbeyondcast.com/ for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. In this Cast &#124; How to Find Your “Perfect Fit” Franchise with Franchise Coach Faizun Kamal Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Faizun Kamal, Franchise ConsultantCEO of The Franchise Pros Faizun Kamal is a franchise coach, nationally renowned public speaker and career strategist. As CEO of The Franchise Pros in partnership with The Franchise Consulting Company, Faizun coaches people nationwide on making the transition from employee to entrepreneur. She provides guidance to embrace chaos, fear, insecurity and uncertainty as doorways of opportunity to help individuals find their “perfect fit” business based on an assessment of their personal, lifestyle and income goals. She guides clients to move beyond career burnout to build a sustainable career that they love! Faizun’s drive to make a difference stems from her own personal experience as a corporate refugee. In 2015, after almost a decade in the corporate world, she was laid off. Instead of immediately jumping back into another job, Faizun began a deeply introspective journey to intentionally redesign her career, and her life. Through the world of franchising, she discovered a way to live a life of purpose, passion and profit! Her experiences as a former Fortune 15 Executive with 18+ years of experience in corporate, multinational, nonprofit &#38; entrepreneurial settings on three continents have made her an inspirational speaker to audiences worldwide. Faizun’s relatablity and authenticity has led her to grow an engaged following of thousands on social media. The Tory Burch Foundation named Faizun as “A Woman to Watch”. She has been featured extensively on Forbes, The Huffington Post and The Washington Business Journal, among many others. Faizun received her BA in Women’s Studies and Environmental Studies from Mount Holyoke College. She holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy and a Master’s in Business Administration from the Johns Hopkins University. She is also a graduate of Stanford University’s acclaimed Social Entrepreneurship Program. Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. For listeners of this show, listen to the episode and reach out to Faizun via email for the really generous offer she&#8217;s made during the interview! The Right Franchise for You: Escape the 9 to 5, Generate Wealth, &#38; Live Life on Your Terms by Faizun Kamal You can follow Faizun Kamal on Social: On LinkedIn:   https://www.linkedin.com/in/faizunkamal/ On Twitter:       https://twitter.com/faizun_kamal On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/faizunkamalFRANCHISE/ Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360ad1da" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360ad1da" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360ad1da" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360ad1da" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Voiceover Artist 0:00 Welcome to web and beyond cast, where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond with your host gray Sidney-Smith Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:10 Hello there small business owners, entrepreneurs and community. Welcome to Episode 20 of web and beyond cast. On today&#8217;s episode, we&#8217;re going to be talking about franchising. Again, I have back with me, Pfizer and Kemal from the franchise consulting company. And as you know, franchising is a form of small business ownership that really doesn&#8217;t get a lot of love in the economic development space. And so I wanted to just do this series with Pfizer. And so we can get a little bit more understanding of what it looks like in this episode we&#8217;re going to talk about is the idea of faisons six step process for picking the perfect fit franchise, Say that three times fast. But for those of you who do not know five zone, I would highly recommend that you snap back to our first episode where we talked about that, about her process of thinking about franchising as a small business owner, a little bit about Pfizer, and though Pfizer is a nationally renowned public speaker, and career strategist, as CEO of the franchise pros, in partnership with a franchise consulting company, buzzin, coaches people nationwide on making the transition from employee to entrepreneur. And so with that, welcome to web beyond cast baizen. Faizun Kamal 1:23 Fantastic Ray, it&#8217;s a delight to be here with you again, my friend one Yes, Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:28 absolutely. So I know that you have the six step process, and you are the expert on the process. And so I want you to walk us maybe through maybe what the steps are, and then let&#8217;s dig into some of the particulars that will help someone who is thinking about franchising, really get into the process and understand what is necessary to go from zero to owning a franchise. Faizun Kamal 1:49 Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, Ray, one of the things my friend that I find in the years that I&#8217;ve been doing, this is why people most people know what a franchise is, because they see them everywhere. When you start to dig, however, a little bit deeper than that, most people get stumped. And they say, Well, I don&#8217;t really know what a franchise does, or the way it operates. And most certainly, when I&#8217;m speaking with someone who is looking to buy a franchise for themselves, the question becomes, what do I do? Are there steps that I follow? Do I have to do this all on my own? Is there a to use the phrase is there a method to the madness. And the beautiful thing here, Ray, and frankly, this is one of the things my friend that I love so much about this industry. And there are quite a few things. But this one thing in that when I work with someone who does not have that background in franchise ownership, they may never have owned the business in their lives before. This is This looks like a big, tall, scary mountain to them. And they don&#8217;t quite know how to begin that accent. And in my book, as you rightly stated, I&#8217;ve broken it down into bite sized pieces. So if you&#8217;re looking at the elephant and you&#8217;re saying I want to eat that elephant, well, you can just go the whole animal down, you have to start biting it off in little chunks sized pieces. And that&#8217;s what we do. It&#8217;s a very simple process, Ray. But it&#8217;s a very effective process. I say to my clients, this process only works if you work it, otherwise it doesn&#8217;t. In terms of the first first step, it really begins with you know, the very famous phrase Know thyself. Ancient Greeks, right. When someone first comes to me, Ray, it&#8217;s really a simple conversation. So if you came to me and said, Zune, you know, I&#8217;ve been thinking about starting a franchise, but I have no idea where to begin. My first question to you is not going to be about a franchise, it&#8217;s instead going to be Oh, that&#8217;s interesting way. Well, tell me a little bit about you. What do you do? What have you done in the last 1015 years of your career? What industry have you been in? So you know, in the work that you currently do, Ray, give me a sense of what does a day in the life of Ray look like? And in these questions, Ray, what I&#8217;m trying to what I&#8217;m trying to pull out, what I&#8217;m trying to assert in is, what kind of skill sets does this particular person come to the table with? You might say, you know, five Zune. I have been the Vice President of Marketing for ABC Company for the last 15 years. And I have a small team of people that I manage, and there are these discrete marketing projects that I run for my company, and I manage them from start to finish. Um, it just was few things that you&#8217;ve shared with me, Ray, I&#8217;m able to pull out a couple of things. One, if you&#8217;re managing a team People, you&#8217;re probably very good interpersonally you might have some skill sets in and around hiring and firing. You might be I don&#8217;t know this, you might be good at mentoring others, helping them grow. You&#8217;ve already told me you have a background in marketing, that tells me something, you might have said, Oh, you know, I, I managed a little, I manage a bit of a p&#38;l, it&#8217;s about $50 million for the company. And I manage that on a yearly basis. Again, what that tells me is operationally, you probably have some skill sets there. So in the first conversation, it&#8217;s really me trying to pull out and understand why at this point in your life and career, are you thinking about starting a business? Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:45 Are people usually shocked by some of the realizations that have you asking them these questions, and maybe potentially realizing that they have skill sets they didn&#8217;t have before that translate better for franchise? Faizun Kamal 5:58 All the time, my friend, probably one of the biggest questions I get asked is, I have a background in ABC? Is there anything out there for someone like me, right, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s because they have only known that thing. And they&#8217;ve done that thing for many, many years. And they haven&#8217;t looked beyond that. And I will typically laugh and say, I don&#8217;t know yet. But in all likelihood, probably there is the beautiful thing, right? With the franchises, you know, when you when you contrast what all of us have gone through, and we were employees, so you&#8217;re in a job, and then you&#8217;re thinking about making a move, and you look at some job description of a job that you want to get into. And you, you look at the 10 things that the job description lists out, and you say to yourself, Oh, um, you know, seven of these, I can do quite well, two of them, I&#8217;m sure I can figure it out, and the one thing, but I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ll be able to, I&#8217;ll be able to do it when I get into the position. My point is, as employees, we try to force fit ourselves into what the job requires of us. In a franchise, my friend, there is no force fitting, the franchise is what it is. And it requires an individual with a certain with a certain skill set. If you have the skill set. And this is where I the way I liken it ray is in a job situation, here&#8217;s your employer potential employer, this is you. It&#8217;s not a level playing field by any means. When you look at franchises, however, it&#8217;s very much like this, the same way that you as a client are evaluating potential opportunities. The brands are similarly looking at you to try and figure out and say, Would Ray be a top performing franchisee for us if he were to enter our system? So step one, is we conduct what we call your personal franchise analysis, getting a baseline of who you are, what you&#8217;re about, what are your strengths? What are your blind spots? What are the things you like to do Ray? What are some things you would rather get your tooth pulled out without lighter cane, then do those things and we all have a right you laugh? We all have them? Once I start to get that sense of who you are. Now I can get now I feel much more comfortable saying huh? Okay, right. Yeah, potentially, there might be some opportunities that are a fantastic fit for you. I don&#8217;t know that yet. But I&#8217;m starting to get that sense. Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:30 So after that, in that introspection that that analysis of the of the individual and and potentially sometimes it&#8217;s a couple, right husband and wife or maybe potential, multiple, multiple business partners, once that analysis is done, what&#8217;s the next step in the process of determining the franchise fit Faizun Kamal 8:49 at this point, you still have not been scared away by me. At this point, we are going to have you go through a couple of sales and management aptitude assessments, regardless of what the business is, and I work with several hundred brands, right? Regardless of what the business is, you have to come to the table with some with some background, some skill set in management, and a little bit in sales, those two you can&#8217;t run away from. So I try to get a sense of what what those skill sets might be like. That, again, gives me that really robust baseline that I&#8217;m looking for, Raymond Sidney-Smith 9:25 do you then get a sense that you have to send people kind of off to get a little bit of that training? You know, do people sometimes go through the franchise analysis, get into the business model design and decision making process and say, Oh, you know what, I don&#8217;t have these skills. Faizun Kamal 9:39 Absolutely. It happens many more times than you might imagine. And, you know, it&#8217;s a, it&#8217;s not necessarily what they have wanted to hear. But they also understand that franchise ownership is it&#8217;s not an easy thing. Running a business. Whether it&#8217;s a franchise or not a franchise is not easy. In addition, with a franchise, it can be a pretty sizable investment that you&#8217;re making. So if you&#8217;re going to do those two key things, you want to be as prepared as you possibly can be for that. So step two, really, I get the assessments back, and then I will sit down with you, my client. And we are now going to build out what we call you just referenced it, your personal franchise business model. Your business model is not the same as a business plan, which many of us have heard about, think of the business models re as I&#8217;m walking into our meeting, and I have to paint brushes, and I have a blank canvas in my hand. And through the course of our conversation, I&#8217;m going to hand you one of the paint brushes together through a series of questions that I&#8217;m going to ask you to better understand who you are, you are going to help me paint a very detailed picture of what does Ray&#8217;s Perfect Fit franchise look like? What are race skill sets? He&#8217;s already shared those with me in first, in the first step, I take those, what are the things? What are his goals from a franchise, his personal, professional, financial lifestyle, whatever your goals might be? I want to know those things. And then third, last but not least, even though we don&#8217;t we are not yet talking about specific brands. What are those specific characteristics of the businesses that you would like your franchise to have? What do I mean by that, you might say, if I zoom in, I am much more comfortable in a business to business setting than a business to customer setting. I would like a franchise that plays in the b2b space. That&#8217;s a very specific thing. You&#8217;re telling me I put that down. You might say, you know, if I Zune I want to hit this really hard in the first couple of years. But after that, I want to start to hire a small team of people so that I can start to take a backseat. Aha, that&#8217;s a very specific element that you just said to me, right? That&#8217;s what we call a semi absentee business, in the industry. Right? So these are the kinds of nuances and I go through all of these questions with you. I joke with my clients, by the time we are the end of the second conversation, you&#8217;re going to get so sick and tired of me because I have asked you so many, many questions. But that would be that would be step to building your franchise business model. Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:34 And so then we go into the next step, which seems to be kind of a two parter. Three, and three and four seem to be connected very much together. What does that look like for folks when they are going into the process? What is step three and four? And and how does that work? for folks to kind of get through those stages and validating and doing your due diligence. Faizun Kamal 12:53 Once you have finished step two, the other, the other parts of the process, three to six re think of that entire process as what we call due diligence. You the client are going to go through this educational research process that I&#8217;ll take you through that we call due diligence, where based on the assessments that I have done, have you have what I think you might be a great fit for, I will present you with typically three brands. Three, three seems to be like Goldilocks porridge gray, it&#8217;s just right. Two brands are too few and four seem to be too many for most people. Three is that right number where it they&#8217;re just able to manage all of the information that they&#8217;re being bombarded with, because you&#8217;re going to get a lot once you begin. In Step three, we begin due diligence with the franchise ORS. So remember, step two, I now have your business model, I take your business model, and I go into my inventory of brands there, I start to do that first set of matching. And what do I match? I am looking at those brands that I have in inventory whose business models most closely matches yours. So it&#8217;s a very intentional step by step process, right? This is not you know, put some blindfolds on and then throw darts in the dark hope to God, it hits the bullseye. That is not what we are doing Raymond Sidney-Smith 14:22 here. It&#8217;s a it&#8217;s a Venn diagram, you&#8217;re overlapping the right parts. Faizun Kamal 14:26 I might steal that from you. Yes, very much like diagram, right? We are trying to figure out what are those overlapping parts? Because I don&#8217;t know that yet about you. That&#8217;s what we are trying to figure out. So step three, we begin the due diligence process with the franchisors I present three brands to you. The brand at that point will then reach out to you to begin that conversation. The very simply read the expectation, when you begin this process with me is every week, you&#8217;re expected to do one call with every single one of the brands So three calls, in addition to the three calls you make with each brand, there&#8217;s going to be a fourth call that you are going to make with me. This is our weekly touch base. You know, I&#8217;m not one of those people, Ray, where I&#8217;ll give you some brands, shake your hand and say, great meeting you, my friend, and then I disappear. And you never hear from me again, until at the very end, that defeats the purpose. There is a reason why this industry has been as successful as it has been. And it is because brands are able, with the help of people like me, brands are able to get just the right qualified, just the right skilled people to come into their system as franchisees. So that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s essentially what I do every step of the way, as I walk you through. So begin that conversation, and boom, now you are in what we call due diligence. Every week, the brand will take you through some specific aspects of the business, that they want you the potential franchisee, to learn and understand about. Raymond Sidney-Smith 16:04 Fantastic. And so we go through this process of the franchise leading you and then you get to the flip side of that where you go into what you call the validation process or what the industry calls the validation process. And so it&#8217;s kind of like dating. One side is doing a little bit of of education. And the other part now is you doing that in the inverse? Faizun Kamal 16:28 Absolutely, absolutely. So step four. So step three, remember, we began due diligence. Step four is essentially continuing in the due diligence process, but with certain specific things in the process now that I will have you focus on there&#8217;s two in particular one, it&#8217;s what you just said. And by the way, you i think you know far more about franchising great than you let let me believe you think it&#8217;s terms around, you&#8217;re throwing it around validation and all that I love it, I love it, essentially, you&#8217;re going to get into what I call the heart of the process. And that is validation. Very simply validation is when you are going to be speaking with existing franchisees of the three brands that I have introduced you to, because think about it as your franchise coach. I have hundreds of brands I work with. I know about the brands, but I certainly don&#8217;t know all the nitty gritty, the brand rep that you are speaking to every week, they certainly know a lot because they work with the brand. But who is in the most perfect position to share with you, Ray, here&#8217;s what a day in the life of someone running this particular business. Here&#8217;s what it looks like. Here are the challenges you&#8217;re going to face in the first 12 months of business. Here is the point at which I broke even and I got to profitability. Here are some of the things that I wasn&#8217;t aware of that I became aware of once I became a franchisee there&#8217;s no one better to answer these very granular, visceral questions, then the franchisees themselves. One of the things I&#8217;m going to share with you think about this, is there anything else that you are aware of where before you make an investment, whether it&#8217;s a stock, whether it&#8217;s a bond, whether it&#8217;s a whatever, before you make that investment, it allows you It takes the veil off and says come inside, come inside and take a look at how we work before you decide to make that investment in us. There&#8217;s nothing else out there in the marketplace that does that. I love that about franchises because my friend if you&#8217;re a homeowner, second only to your mortgage, and sometimes it can be more than your mortgage. Investing in a franchise is a sizable financial investment. This is not something I take lightly. If you work with me, I will not let you take it lightly. Again, the point is, there should not be any regrets after you&#8217;ve signed the dotted lines. So before you sign the dotted lines, I want you to go through due diligence in the best in the most robust in the most aggressive way possible. So validation. The second thing as you are as you are wrapping up validation ray is the legal piece. Every franchise in order to be able to legally sell franchise units around the country. They have to be registered with the Federal Trade Commission, which is our regulatory oversight body. And as part of this process as part of this requirement, every brand is required to register with the federal government a document called the MDD or the Franchise Disclosure Document. It is typically two 300 pages thick. It&#8217;s a legal document it is not superduper exciting. I joke with my clients you know if you ever have trouble falling asleep at night, cozy right up to the heavens. DD and you will fall asleep just like that. Jokes aside though, it is one of the most important pieces of this process and what it does essentially is the MTD is comprised of what we call sections or, or items 23 separate sections in the document. And each section of the document walks you through some particular aspects of the brand. That again, you as a potential franchisee you need to know about. So for example, one of the first sections we&#8217;ll talk about to the management team is here you are getting ready to invest in this brand. But what are you investing in? What are the founders? Who&#8217;s the management team? Do they know what the heck they&#8217;re doing? You want to know that you will get into something we call item or Section seven. item seven is your average investment. It lays out in great detail. Ray if you want to come on board and join us as a franchisee you&#8217;re looking at investing 60 to $120,000. It&#8217;ll give you a range. And it breaks down in great detail. Potentially What are all of the items you will need to invest in? Whether it&#8217;s equipment, whether it&#8217;s vehicles, whether it&#8217;s materials, whether it&#8217;s probably right, depending on what the businesses, one of the most important parts in the MTD is what we call item 19. Item 19 is the earnings claim. So when clients come to me, the first question is, can you help me find the right franchise? Question number two immediately becomes Can you give me a franchise that helps me make the most amount of money? And what would those look like? And the answer is, I don&#8217;t know, I can tell you that this is part of the intent of due diligence. And item 19 lays out the brand lays out for you. We have 100 franchisees in the system. Here&#8217;s how much money the top third of franchisees are making, here&#8217;s how much money the middle performing franchisees are making. Here&#8217;s how much money our lowest performing franchisees are making, they will break that out for you. Why? Again, as you go through the process, Ray, what you&#8217;re trying to figure out is okay, you know, faisons walked me through the steps, I have a sense of what the business does. I&#8217;m starting to feel really good about what the brand requires of its franchisees I know I have the skill set, I can absolutely do the work well. But I&#8217;m investing my money in this, I&#8217;m looking at growing this business over the next 10 or so years. Don&#8217;t I want to know how much money I can actually make? Absolutely, that is what part of the MTD does. So we take you through this MTD, legal review. The one thing I&#8217;ll make mention, and endowed this step Ray, many clients at this stage get super excited and say oh my god, Pfizer, I think this is the one for me. And I say timeout, we are not going to do anything until you have taken that MTD and you have sat down with a franchise attorney. I want you to know what your rights roles and responsibilities are visibly the brand. I am not an attorney, but I work with some of the best in the country. And I&#8217;m happy to do an introduction for you with one of them. So that in essence becomes Step four, Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:18 what you&#8217;re talking about here is that once you get through validation on that on on Step four, and get into the FTD, you&#8217;re how many fdds does a typical client review, you know, it&#8217;s a 200 page tome of documentation. And it&#8217;s really good for them to review that in detail with you and by themselves and ask all the questions and then meet with a franchise attorney. How many? How many do you feel like the average client with you reviews? Faizun Kamal 23:45 I have not yet had a client who has looked at more than five. And this you raise a very good point, Trey, I think there are a lot of people, they come into this process with the mistaken assumption. Faison is going to hand me a laundry list of 1015 brands. And then I just you know run out there and do what I need to do. The intent is not for you to look as an act as many different kinds of businesses you can because it&#8217;s that becomes a scattershot approach. As I walked you through, it&#8217;s very intentional. The you know the step four builds on Step three, which builds on step two, right? So it&#8217;s a very Think of it as a pyramid and you&#8217;re going up the pyramid it&#8217;s a it&#8217;s a big it&#8217;s a big mistaken assumption that a lot of people have where they think unless I look at 2030 businesses, I won&#8217;t be able to know that is absolutely not true. Because when you go through due diligence, how many of these fdds are you actually going to go through in detail? How many can you actually go through, right? So again, it&#8217;s a very specific process. Think of it as Ray when someone begins with me at the beginning. They&#8217;re at the mouth of the funnel. Think of a funnel As I take them through the process, the funnel keeps narrowing. Until what we get spit out at the end is that one brand that checks out all of the different things that you want the business to give you. Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:11 So I misspoke early. I said, that was step five. That was that we were still on set. For one, we&#8217;re still reviewing the FTD. And so then we get on from, we feel really confident in this particular brand. And we get into our next step, which is really funding. And what does that process look like for most of your clients as they as they have now, kind of almost wedded themselves to a particular brand? Faizun Kamal 25:36 Wonderful. And you know, it&#8217;s a little bit of a while I call it Step five, Ray? Step five actually happens as soon as I introduce you to brands? Here&#8217;s why. Question number one that most clients have, what is the right brand for me? Question number two, how much money can I make? Question number three inevitably becomes? Well, finally, once I have found the right business for me, how am I going to fund it? I&#8217;m not sitting on a million dollars cash, it doesn&#8217;t cost a million dollars. But whatever the amount is, my intent when my clients begin working with me, is this needs to be a one stop shop. Why? When I introduced you to brands, Ray, I want you to focus all of your time and energies on investigating those brands doing the diligence properly. What I don&#8217;t want you to do is you&#8217;re doing this with me. But then you are running around like a headless chicken, going to your local bank doing this doing that trying to figure out oh my gosh, where am I going to line up the money to buy the business that I don&#8217;t want you to do, it becomes an exercise in frustration, it becomes counter productive. Instead, as soon as I introduce you to brands, the fourth introduction, so three brands, the fourth introduction I&#8217;m going to make for you is going to be with my funding concierge. It&#8217;s a the business model that I have developed over the years Ray, it&#8217;s quite a bit different from a lot of other people in the industry. I like to keep everything in house, because my clients appreciate the seamlessness, if you will, where they&#8217;re not having to go to multiple people from multiple different things. Another reason why I introduced my clients to an attorney, you can go to whoever you would like they have to be a franchise attorney, they cannot be a real estate attorney, it cannot be your brother in law, who does, you know, Family Law franchise attorney. But again, by keeping these experts in house, it allows you the client to focus on the one thing that you&#8217;re supposed to do focus on understanding the brands. So my funding concierge, who has been in franchise funding, probably longer than I have been alive, at least it feels like it. She will essentially walk you through. She will take your specific financials, everyone&#8217;s financial situation is different. She will sit down with you and do a very detailed deep dive into Okay, Ray, you&#8217;re sharing with me, here&#8217;s how much liquidity you have. Here&#8217;s what your network looks like, looks like you own a home. Here&#8217;s how much equity you have. Looks like over time you invested this much in a retirement account, whatever your specifics are, she takes all of that. And then she comes up with the funding plan that says Ray, based on your specifics, these three seem to be the top three ways in which to fund your business Once you have found it. And it could be number one, SBA loan number two, a retirement account rollover, number three, right, and she goes down through through that. As I walk you through the process, Ray, you will be working with her hand in glove. Same way you&#8217;re working with me. And as we go through, she&#8217;s helping you figure out where you say, okay, you know, it sounds like this may be the best option for me. And you start to put together the packaging the documentation required around that as we are moving through your due diligence at the same time. So that would be Step five, Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:09 and just like and then we close out the whole process and there is this wonderful day you spend with your franchise. What does that look like? What does Step six looks like for for franchise potential franchise owners. Faizun Kamal 29:21 So step six, you are now you&#8217;ve done the bulk of the due diligence. And typically at this point Ray, my clients will have one brand that has risen to the top. They are really starting to feel good about the brand. And the brand is really starting to fall in love with you. At that point they will reach out to me the brands will reach out to me and they will say Zune. We have absolutely loved getting to know Ray. We feel confident that he&#8217;s going to be a really great fit with our system and who we are looking for. We would like to extend an invitation for him to come meet To us meet the entire corporate team at our headquarters in what&#8217;s known as a discovery day. That&#8217;s what it&#8217;s called, it&#8217;s a discovery day, discovery day is that very last step in the process, right? By the time a client goes to discovery day, they&#8217;re probably 95%. Certain, this is the brand that they&#8217;re going to go with that 5% is, I call it life, that you&#8217;re never going to know 100% about everything, right? But this is the step where you go in and you look into the eyeballs of the people who are going to become your business family, hopefully, for a very long time. What do they like, I think great to work with, are they professional? What kind of resources does the brand have at the corporate headquarters? For me, when I come on board, what type of what type of robust systems and support are they going to provide for me? So it&#8217;s that last stage in the process, it&#8217;s typically a day, sometimes a couple days, since COVID, most discovery days have become virtual. So you&#8217;re doing it online. Some brands are slowly starting to ease and go back into in person. But traditionally, they have been in person where they will ask you to come over to the corporate headquarters, you come back from discovery day, it&#8217;s go no go time. So this is where you sit down, we sit down, and you share with me. If you think this is the brand for you, why you think it&#8217;s the brand for you, or you come back and you sell a Zune, and I really thought it was the brand for me, but based on these reasons, I feel like it might not be. And that sort of becomes becomes the endpoint, the last step in the process. Raymond Sidney-Smith 31:43 I&#8217;m so curious about some of the pieces here with regard to the whole process. So I want to I want to kind of review this for everyone watching and listening. So the six step process is conducting the personal franchise analysis, then developing that that business model that you talked about due diligence is step three, and four, were due diligence with the franchises then due diligence with the franchisees during that validation process, then we go into funding Step five, and then attending that discovery day. And the as you noted, no Go Go or no go decision point process. Now, in your own world, you have this really under lock and key. I mean, you make sure that the franchise owner potential franchise owner is really helped at every stage of this process. What are sometimes some of the biggest tripping points people have? Is it funding? Is it deciding on a specific franchise once they&#8217;ve gone through this process? No matter how good anybody is, life is life. Right? So what are the what are the biggest tripping points people have? And how do you help them overcome that? Faizun Kamal 32:52 You know, I think my friend, I would have to say, the biggest tripping point, bar none is fear. This is a huge, life changing, hopefully positive, life changing decision, not just for you, but for your family for a very long time to come. Fear is a natural and inevitable part of the process, it typically rears its ugly head, somewhere in the middle, close towards the end, right? And it comes out in the form of doubts. Zoom, and I started with you I was all gung ho, I don&#8217;t know, you know, should I be doing this? Should I just go back to corporate America? Right, these doubts, this doubts come up. In fact, yesterday, I was speaking with a client of mine. And this is where she is. And she began the call with me by saying, I feel I&#8217;m at a crossroads in the process. Instead, all right, let&#8217;s talk about it. I think ultimately, Ray, my friend entrepreneurship is one of those things, you run your own business. So you know this very intimately. In businesses in life, there are no guarantees. You know, I will sometimes hear this from from clients who will say, I just need to have a guarantee that I&#8217;m going to make this kind of money that this is going to succeed. And I laugh and I say if that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re looking for, then I think I&#8217;m the wrong person for you. No one can give you that. Right. So I think it&#8217;s you know, I mentioned 95% 95% of the certainty comes because you have conducted the due diligence very aggressively. You&#8217;ve you&#8217;ve peeked into every little nook and cranny. You&#8217;ve tried to understand the business models, you&#8217;ve tried to understand, what does their ideal franchisee look like and Do I look like them? In terms of skill sets, you&#8217;ve done the due diligence, that 5% is what I call the unknowable. It&#8217;s what involves grace. Here&#8217;s where a little bit of faith comes in right where you say I am That confident in myself and in my abilities that even though I will never know 100% I will still move ahead because I know I can make this work, I can make this successful. So fear, absolutely fear Raymond Sidney-Smith 35:12 antastic. So as we as we close out, I wanted to just give you an opportunity to share anything that you wanted to with folks, and I know that you have a little bit of something that you wanted to give viewers and listeners. Yes, yes. Faizun Kamal 35:24 Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I would love to be able to offer your listeners a complimentary copy of my best selling book. Of course, if they wanted to go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble and bite from there. They&#8217;re more than they&#8217;re more than welcome to do so. But I would love to send them a complimentary copy. I think once the episodes go up, Ray, you&#8217;re good to have my contact information. But for folks, LinkedIn is the best way to find me and connect with me. Email wise I am at a Zune Fei z u n. Fi Zune at the franchise consulting company.com. All small and books and always get a hold of me 443646276. So I welcome folks reaching out I always love to Raymond Sidney-Smith 36:14 chat. Wonderful, you do my job for me. You are so wonderful. Thank you so much for being here on whether the on Cast button so lovely to be with you. Thank you. All right. So that was Faison Kemal and she is with the franchise pros. Go find her and follow her. Links to her social media profiles are in the show notes. And of course, check out her book. As she noted, she&#8217;s offering a complimentary copy. It&#8217;s also available on Amazon and elsewhere, the right franchise for you escape the nine to five, generate wealth and live life on your terms. And so with that, thank you all for watching and listening to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond. I&#8217;m your host Sidney-Smith Till next time, here&#8217;s your small business success on the web and beyond. Take care, everybody  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqbA8j0vmxY New Web Analytics Tools from Microsoft and Cloudflare Each week, President of W3 Consulting and Managing Director of W3C Web Services (https://web.w3cinc.com/) Ray Sidney-Smith broadcasts live to update you on the latest small business digital marketing and business productivity technology updates you need to be effective. This week, among other news, Ray covers the new Web analytics tools from Microsoft and Cloudflare. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://webandbeyondcast.com/ for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. 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Health Insurance Marketplace&#124; HealthCare.gov  Everything You Need to Vote &#8211; Vote.org  Events – W3 Consulting Join us in Web and Beyond Community Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360af605" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360af605" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360af605" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360af605" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:04 Hi there, everybody, and welcome to web and beyond live for November 2 2020. I&#8217;m Ray Sidney-Smith. And I am president of W three consulting as well as managing director of WCC web services, which provides affordable WordPress and web hosting along with domain registration services and other web related services for small business. And so I welcome everybody here to web and beyond live, where I come to you each week to talk about digital marketing and productivity, and other technology news that I want to share with you that&#8217;s related to your small business. And today we have an action packed show. As you know, the last three weeks or so, I have been covering cybersecurity topics, which are not the sexiest topics of all, but I tried to do my best to help guide folks through really a fairly important topic in National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. And so with that out of the way, we are now going to make our way back to our normal digital marketing and productivity and technology news that I cover each week. And so this week, I have lots to cover, including at the end, we&#8217;re going to talk about Microsoft and CloudFlare really trying to step up their challenge to Google Analytics, that&#8217;s going to be a really interesting thing coming down the pike. But first note that we are in November now we have just passed daylight saving time. So we are now back in eastern standard time here in the United States. So if you happen to be watching from another timezone, or from another country, just note that we are now in eastern standard time. So we have, you know, changed times. So this is now 11am. Eastern Standard Time, in case you weren&#8217;t aware. Okay, so let&#8217;s get into the news. Because I have a lot of it. We&#8217;ve been backed up backlogged from doing all the cybersecurity news over the past cyber security topics over the past weeks. But let&#8217;s just get into some of the things that I wanted to cover. This week. We&#8217;re going to talk about WordPress, we&#8217;re going to talk about Facebook, we&#8217;re going to talk about some podcast News. I&#8217;m going to talk about a more analytics news when we get to the end, and lots of little goodies in between. So let&#8217;s first start off with some, just a couple of things out of WordPress. First and foremost, WordPress is working toward WordPress 5.6, to come out sometime in December, and they recently put out a call for Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:25 people to test their widgets screen in Gutenberg 9.1. And so for those who are not aware, Gutenberg is now the block based drag and drop editor that you use when you&#8217;re inside WordPress. And since we host words WordPress websites, obviously we&#8217;re big fans of WordPress. And WordPress is calling for testers for that system. So if you are if you have the fortitude to play around with an experimental set of features, the widget screen is basically that part of the the area of WordPress where you can go into appearance and change those widgets where they show up within the theme of your WordPress website. This is very powerful stuff. Because we&#8217;re bringing now the editor functions, the Gutenberg editor functions into the widget screen. We know they&#8217;re trying to bring the navigation screen online and those kinds of things. So So in essence, we&#8217;re bringing what was now the kind of back end drag and drop capabilities. They&#8217;re trying to bring that now to the front end of the site. So it&#8217;s going to be very, very powerful. It&#8217;s not going to get rid of drag and drop web builders like WP bakery and other kinds of tools like that, but it is definitely going to give us far more power in the system. Speaking of WP bakery, if you have WP bakery installed, I highly highly recommend that you make sure you update it There was a recent vulnerability and it&#8217;s obviously affecting all installations of WP bakery page builder. So if you have not updated WP bakery in any length of time, make sure that you do okay. You will also note that WordPress made a little bit of a gap recently, they installed a new release that was in alpha state and they push that out to all of the WordPress installations globally. Now, I&#8217;m not sure all of the WordPress installations got updated. But either way, they fixed it. They went back and they rolled back the update. So there was a maintenance maintenance release that was pushed out so all WordPress websites that were automatically updating should have gotten that update and rolled back. That being the case what you need to do. Every person who has a WordPress installation, what you need to do. That means you if you have a WordPress installation, you must go to your WordPress installation, login. Make sure all your plugins are updated, make sure all of your themes are updated. But go into your themes directory. And you will see that WordPress probably now has all of the default themes that were created in 20 2010 2011. through, you know, whatever 2020 themes are probably now installed in your WordPress theme directory. If you are not using them delete all but one of those default themes just as a backup theme in case something happens with the theme you are using. So delete those excess themes, you don&#8217;t need them. And they pose somewhat of a security risk if you do not keep them up to date. Likewise, WordPress also probably installed its default akismet the spam filtering plugin, so go to plugins, and see if a Kismet is installed. If you are using another spam plugin, then go ahead and you can go ahead and delete a Kismet because you don&#8217;t need it. If you&#8217;re using a Kismet and all&#8217;s well there, keep on you know, using it, you&#8217;re good to go. But just know that it did do that process of you know, installing that accidentally. And so we are going to have to deal with that. So if you have WordPress installation, go go do that, because it&#8217;s just good for security. Next up, though, I thought this was really interesting. So WordPress has a plugin called jetpack. And what it does is it brings a whole bunch of functions and features that are normally present in wordpress.com, which is the hosting that is provided by automatic the company, they have their own hosting, because they develop WordPress, the open source software, they host WordPress websites themselves. And they have they have a plugin called jetpack, they maintain jetpack, as well as WooCommerce, and several other, you know, plugins of that nature. And they recently added a new feature that allows you inside jet jetpack to basically tweet an entire blog post. And so what that means is, is that I&#8217;m going to show you the article here on screen. But what you&#8217;re what you see here is, you now have the ability to take a blog post that you&#8217;ve written. And what it will do now is it will go ahead and break the whole blog post into Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:59 a tweet thread. So if you&#8217;re not familiar with Twitter, if you tweet once, and then you open up that tweet on your screen, you can click the Reply button, that little comment looking button. And each of those subsequent tweets from you, not from others, but from you specifically becomes what&#8217;s considered a thread. Now that thread can include comments from others and that kind of thing. But the primary focus here is that items that you post are showing up in that thread and it&#8217;s readable. This is very powerful for those who want to write a tweet that is more than the, you know, 280 characters that you can fit inside of a single tweet. So that Twitter thread now pushed from WordPress as content through jetpack now gives you the ability to have embedded images, video, audio content, all kinds of different, you know, multimedia embedded within the tweet, and it will then just naturally display that content in the Twitter thread that is published from the blog post. This is very powerful stuff. And I&#8217;m really looking forward to writing some posts and pushing them out as Twitter threads to see what happens in the tweet thread. So if you see me on Twitter, doing some of that, that is what I will be. That&#8217;s why it&#8217;s doing it because I want to see how it all works. In that sense. Okay. Moving right along, we have some other news out of WordPress. And that is, in addition to being able to Oh, I just wanted to close out that is. So as a reminder, Google has launched something called web stories for WordPress. So if I, if you if you&#8217;ve missed a couple episodes, and you weren&#8217;t aware, please know that this exists. And you should start using it. ASAP. I&#8217;ve now started seeing it show up in my google news app and in Google discover, and it&#8217;s pretty amazing. So these are basically stories, the stories format that you have come to know through Snapchat, and Instagram, and Facebook and otherwise, the Instagram Stories feature. Now it&#8217;s also in LinkedIn. LinkedIn has stories from the mobile app. So if you are aware of stories, you know the power of stories, you can now do this directly inside of your WordPress installation. So go check it out. Very, very powerful stuff happening there. Okay, moving right along to now, some Facebook news. Let&#8217;s start off with the the bad news. Facebook is deprecating their ability for you to embed your Instagram and Facebook posts that you have embedded in the site. So this has already happened. So Facebook is already you know, dropping support for embedded content on WordPress websites. What that means is is that you are going to have to create an IF YOU&#8217;RE techie, you&#8217;re going to have to create a Facebook developer account. You may have to do this either way. This that&#8217;s that&#8217;s the first step. And then go ahead and register a Facebook app, you&#8217;ll then go ahead and be able to then embed content Raymond Sidney-Smith 10:12 directly inside the WordPress installation. This all requires quite a bit of tech Enos, there are instructions for that I&#8217;ve linked in the video and the show notes. So you can go check that out. But if that&#8217;s not quite your flavor, if you need a WordPress plugin, there are two WordPress plugins that will overcome this. So if you&#8217;ve ever embedded Facebook and or Instagram content on your website, that will break very soon if it hasn&#8217;t already. And so there&#8217;s two Oh, embed plus, oh, embed is the technology that&#8217;s used to embed content across the web. And WordPress supports many sites to be able to do that. So if you&#8217;re in a WordPress website, for example, you could take a YouTube URL, and just paste that as a new line in your WordPress installation, and it will naturally embed the content right of the display the video, you can go ahead and go from there. You can also do that with another WordPress link. So for example, if you took a blog post from my website, went over to your WordPress website and pasted that link into your own blog post, it would naturally display an embedded and embedded form, it wouldn&#8217;t be the whole blog post, but it would be kind of a little beautiful embed of that WordPress blog post the title and link to it and a little bit of the preview text of that particular blog post. And then you can go ahead and write commentary and so on and so forth about that blog post, right. So I&#8217;ll embed is very powerful technology, it works for Twitter, and many other sites. Well, WordPress is dropping support for Facebook and Instagram, because Facebook is dropping support for Oh embed. So Oh, embed plus is one of those plugins and allows you to be able to do that either way, you&#8217;re gonna have to create a Facebook developer account. So you&#8217;re gonna have to do that one way or the other, I believe, then smash balloon plugins, the Smash balloon plugin is the other one that will be able to allow you to go ahead and do that. So you register your Facebook developer account, you create the app inside of Facebook. This is that&#8217;s all fairly easy. That&#8217;s not difficult to do. I mean, it&#8217;s just basically checking some boxes and filling in some data fields. And and then Facebook will pop out an API key for you to provide 201 bed plus or smash balloons, but just know that that is happening. Okay. Secondary bad news, Facebook is going to start charging for WhatsApp business services. So Facebook said on October 22, I&#8217;m sorry, on Thursday, the Thursday prior to October 20. Oh, yeah, on October 22, they noted that they&#8217;ll start charging for WhatsApp for business. So in essence, they&#8217;re going to start charging for having a WhatsApp business account. As well as they&#8217;re going to continue, obviously, to charge for advertising on Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp. So they&#8217;re going to start charging for its chat services. And it says that they&#8217;re, you know, just going to start offering, you know, more and more opportunities to build revenue. You know, for Facebook, by virtue of that, I guess they have to, you know, support the system somehow. And so they&#8217;re going to be doing that. So then was a little bit of good news. I just came across this and didn&#8217;t realize this had happened. But in September, Facebook has now removed the restriction. I haven&#8217;t removed the content guidance, and the guidelines on this, but the restriction on text content in Facebook ads has now been removed. Meaning that once upon a time, if you had more than 20% text in an image of an ad, it was automatically rejected. And then you could appeal to say, hey, there&#8217;s a reason why I have more than 20% text here. Going forward. Now though, as of September 7, it says here, Facebook started removing that restriction completely on ad images on Facebook. So Raymond Sidney-Smith 13:56 that&#8217;s very, very powerful and very useful. Of course, they still recommend that you keep less than 20% of your ad images, you know, to to text. So just be mindful of that. But it&#8217;s great that they removed it as a restriction so that you don&#8217;t get those blocked. Okay. Moving along. We have some podcasts news, one Google podcasts manager is the application that you can claim your podcast. And if you have a podcast, you can claim your podcast and Google podcasts manager by going to podcasts manager.google.com. And they&#8217;re now at the bottom of the screen. Very cool, you are now able to see the search data. So very similar to how you would see this in Google Search Console. You can now see how many impressions that you got from Google search. So I have my podcast ProductivityCast. I can see just looking here at the podcast manager screen I can see how many impressions I got in the past 30 days 28 days. It shows me how many clicks through Google search. I got to the podcast and its click through rate and then below that, it shows me topics search terms, basically what people searched to find the podcast. And then on the right hand side, the top discovered episodes. So this is showing me a top 10 list, you know, I can obviously keep going to see more of them. And you can then sort those by impressions by clicks, and by click through rate. So very cool on Google to continue to give you more information to be able to level up your podcast in that way. Next up is Amazon has recently launched within the amazon music platform, Amazon podcasts. So if you have a podcast, or you planning to have a podcast, Amazon now gives you a way to submit your podcast directly to amazon music. Of course, amazon music has 55 million global customers. And now they are giving you the ability to, you know, syndicate your podcast, to the Apple Music, you know, customers that are in there. I know, with Amazon Prime, I have amazon music. And while I don&#8217;t pay for amazon music, for the additional, you know, on the amazon music Unlimited, I still access amazon music, and I&#8217;m capable of now listening to podcasts directly in there. So that&#8217;s very, very cool. Okay, so that&#8217;s, I think all of my podcast news. Oh, yeah, a little bit of security news, Windows 10, has recently announced that they are going to kill off Adobe Flash Player for good. I mean, thank goodness. So Flash Player, which is very popular in the 90s, as some of you know, is a tool that has just it&#8217;s run its course it is now full of security risks. And slowly but surely all the major browsers have been getting rid of support for it and limiting its view. So if you have a website that once upon a time, ran on flashplayer, I can&#8217;t imagine you&#8217;re getting any traffic any longer, because, you know, they&#8217;ve basically gotten rid of it on all the platforms. But windows 10 now has now removed support for it. And and actually is going to, you know, preemptively remove Adobe Flash Player from devices that are running Windows 10. Now, so in this update, as of December 31 2020, the software reaches end of support completely. But before that, there will be an update that goes ahead and deletes Adobe Flash Player from your device. Anyway. Unfortunately, this is you know, not unfortunately, I mean, just realistically, this is not a surprise, you know, Adobe, apple, Facebook, Google and Mozilla, which produces Firefox, all have plans to end support for flash by by December 2020. So flash is dead, and the Flash Player is dead. And we should all not mourn the loss because it&#8217;s a good, it&#8217;s a good death. Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:49 All right, next up is kind of what&#8217;s called the featured story this week. But I wanted to talk about all of the various web analytics players that are now in the market. First and foremost, CloudFlare announced two products in the past couple of weeks. And and I&#8217;m sorry, in the past month, and both of them are pretty interesting. So first, CloudFlare announced a free web analytics tool to really rival Google Analytics. It&#8217;s not at all as powerful as Google Analytics. But for those of you who are not using an analytics tool, that is you have not already set up Google Analytics, I would recommend that you set up Google Analytics. But for for those of you who are really anti Google, or if you just have have a very light need, right, you just want to know how many people are showing up on your website and some basic statistics about it. CloudFlare now has a tool called CloudFlare web analytics. They call it a privacy first web analytics service, quote unquote, privacy first, but they are trying to focus on giving you fairly accurate web analytics tools. Now, the good part about the way in which I see this is that I always recommend to clients that they have multiple analytics tools on their website. And the reason for that is that you can&#8217;t and shouldn&#8217;t always trust only one tool to giving you data statistics are malleable statistics are just a snapshot based on the set of algorithms and the design of the software for those systems. So you really have to be mindful of how those how that how those data are shown to you. And I like to see multiple versions of it. So for me, we run not only Google Analytics, but several other tools that give us different views of our data analytics. So that we&#8217;re able to see that if if all the data kind of looks the same, then we know everything&#8217;s running right. But if for some reason something seems very skewed in one tool, and seems normal or normative and the others, then we&#8217;re better able to understand maybe, and troubleshoot what might be going on and why the analytics tool might be giving us you know, this randomly difficult And data. So CloudFlare has announced the web analytics tool, it&#8217;s free, you can go ahead and install it. And there&#8217;s links to that in the notes here. Next up, CloudFlare, then immediately turned around in the first week of October and announced a new product are calling the automatic platform optimization for WordPress service. And this new service, basically, is supposed to do a whole bunch of performance improvements for sites that can be slowed down by either shared hosting slow database lookups. Or if you have a bunch of plugins on your system. And it turns out that it really, really works. So I wanted to test it out. So I took it and I placed it on one of my WordPress websites. And and I just basically installed it, it&#8217;s five bucks a month. So it was really nominal in terms of cost. And I turned it on. And within just a short period of time, the site is blazing fast. I mean, it moved the site from loading in eight to 10 seconds, down to less than two seconds. So it is doing lots of optimization in the background. It took very little effort to set up. And I was really, really pleased with its setup. So if you are looking if you&#8217;re in shared hosting, right, whether that&#8217;s what WCC web services or with another shared hosting account, and you are looking to be able to speed up your site really quickly, for five bucks extra per month, you can really, you know, speed up the speed of your site with this aapo for webs for WordPress, the automatic platform optimization for WordPress service through CloudFlare. So check it out. Next up, then Microsoft in any amoud not to be done up by CloudFlare or Google has gone ahead and announced the release of clarity. Clarity is their own web analytics tool that allows you to be able to do a fairly similar things to Google Analytics. They&#8217;re trying to push some front end pieces that seem to be different one, they&#8217;re calling it session playbacks where you can watch individual session recordings, in essence, examining users behavior as it happens. Now, of course, I&#8217;m presuming that they&#8217;re not telling you who those users are, right, they&#8217;re going to keep that abstracted. So you can identify individual users. But the idea here is that you can watch what a user does, through these things they call session playback, that&#8217;s going to be really interesting to watch. They&#8217;re also doing heat mapping, like Google Analytics. And so they&#8217;re bringing heat maps, which means just like colored views of where people click on screen and where they&#8217;re scrolling, and how they basically navigate the website behavior in the Google Analytics terms. Of course, Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:44 they&#8217;re going to be giving you insights in terms of geography, and people who are scrolling and who, where people are navigating the site in terms of data. And then of course, trying to give you back information that can help you build on that. So at the present moment, clarity is a free service. And they are noting that they are GDPR compliant as a data controller for visitors and processor processor for the data gathered by clarity on your site. So they they are saying they are GDPR compliant, which is a great step in the right direction. And so yeah, you can get started by going to clarity.microsoft.com, as well. Microsoft also announced in October, that they were launching a free platform for us small businesses, it&#8217;s called the digital marketing center. And the digital marketing center allows you to be able to set up basically a one stop shop for advertising across various platforms on various, you know, campaign platforms. So you can do this across Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And so it has moved into beta, it&#8217;s open, it&#8217;s free for you to be able to set up the feature that I think is really amazing is that if you actually go to the to the digital marketing center, I haven&#8217;t tried this myself. But what they&#8217;re saying is, is that you&#8217;re able to actually use it to create and publish content across LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. So if your dominant social networks are Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, you should be able to publish that content, you can draft and schedule that content directly in the platform. Now, mind you, you can right now schedule content on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Now, it says here, this is really weird. so on. So Microsoft owns LinkedIn. So that&#8217;s to be expected that it should manage and allow you to do that content on here. Let me just pull this up on screen so you can see this. So right here, it says, draft and schedule content to publish on linked, which I presumed was LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts. But then when we go over to the Social Media tab, it says publish content. So publishing content, draft and schedule content to publish across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and then you post up to 10 of your different profiles across Facebook and Twitter. So very interesting, because there seems to be some discrepancy between which platforms are supported. But I&#8217;m gonna set this up and see how it works for me, and and you can go ahead and do that, let me know what you find. Because obviously, there&#8217;s a little bit of discrepancy in terms of which platforms are supported there. Okay, so with that, we have CloudFlare, with a new web analytics tool, we have Microsoft with clarity, their new web analytics tool. And of course, Google has been working on Google Analytics for so there is currently running Google Analytics, Universal Analytics. That is the current product that everybody has. But Google has now built the next generation as they&#8217;re calling it Google analytics platform. So you can now create those, they can run side by side with your Universal Analytics. And you can now see what Google is doing. In addition to that, Google has created a nice little force that is called discover the next generation of Google Analytics. This is for beginners, it&#8217;ll take you less than an hour. And it&#8217;ll walk you through Google Analytics for and what it can do, how it&#8217;s different from the Universal Analytics. And you can kind of see how those pieces work. So if you&#8217;re interested in learning about that, you can go ahead and take that course. All right. So with that, we have just a couple of other items. And I&#8217;m trying to get back to my screen here. Where is my? Where&#8217;s my screen? It seems like the the screen sharing in the system doesn&#8217;t like me. All right, there we go. So with that, oh, I wanted to show you this, this is really quite brilliant. So the handler, as you know, is one of my favorite tools. It is a graphic design tool. And it has so many other features and functions in it, it has really leveled up my own productivity when it comes to doing this stuff. And what they have done is they have allowed that they&#8217;ve created now the the real time collaboration functionality inside of Canva. So in essence, what you can do now in Canva, in addition to the content planner, where you can schedule content to go out to various social media platforms, they are now giving you the ability to see changes in real time, you can Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:41 save, you know, work, as you make your way along, you can comment and share thoughts and feedback. And and you know, work across any location on any device, all in real time. This is really, really cool to see, kind of like Google Docs, or Google Sheets, or Google Slides, where you&#8217;re live inside a document with your team, you&#8217;re now able to go ahead and make changes in real time and really speed up the production process Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:08 for these kinds of things, so kudos to Canva for that. So if you are not using Canva, you absolutely should. You can use the free version and figure out whether that&#8217;s good for you. And then kind of go from there. A couple of quick little Google notes. I will be doing a separate episode for the What&#8217;s New at Google for both September and October 2020. So all of that Google News, I&#8217;m going to put into an episode that&#8217;ll go out on web and beyond cast. And then later this week, I actually have my second interview in a series that I&#8217;m doing on franchises with franchise coach, Pfizer and Kemal so you can go ahead and on Thursday, you&#8217;ll see that episode, Episode 20, of web and beyond cast go out in the podcast feed and on web and beyond cast.com. So Google Assistant is leveling up some productivity, they are now allowing third party Android apps to be utilized within Google Assistant. So you can say things like, hey, big G, which is the term I use for calling the Google Assistant. But hey, big G, you can say send a tweet, and then it will trigger google assistant to go ahead and open up and allow you to by voice, share a tweet. That&#8217;s really, really powerful. So lots of different applications are launched with that functionality. So far, you can use Etsy you can use YouTube, Instagram Nikes. Adaptive sneakers, didn&#8217;t know they existed, but you can use those tik tok Spotify Postmates, discord, Walmart, Snapchat, Uber, Amazon, Facebook and others. So this is very, very powerful stuff. And so now more and more voice controls will be brought to Google Assistant with these custom shortcuts. So that&#8217;s really powerful. I also am going to be talking about in the What&#8217;s New at Google episode. Apple is supposedly developing an alternative to Google search. I&#8217;m going to kind of debunk and discuss what that really is all about. And and there&#8217;s lots of other Google News that I have to cover in that episode. Okay, so we have run to the end of our time, I have a couple of announcements before we close out. And I just wanted to bring up a couple of items, so that you&#8217;re all aware. So first and foremost, today at noon, if you happen to be watching live, or you&#8217;ve watched this within the next 30 minutes, I&#8217;ll be hosting the Small Business virtual roundtable for November, that happens at noon Eastern, and we&#8217;re actually talking about podcasting, how you can use podcasting to market your business. So if you&#8217;re interested, go ahead and join us at noon. You can also go to web and beyond community or if you go to W the number three c Inc. I NC comm so w three c i NC comm forward slash events, you&#8217;ll find the link on Eventbrite to it. Or you can go to weapon beyond community and inside the community, you&#8217;ll see also a link to do that. So you can join the event from either place, but you have to register in one of those in order to get the zoom link to join us. Also note, I have now launched the web and beyond webinars, whether it be on webinars is going to be our new webinar series. And it&#8217;ll be done in conjunction with the launch actually of our new email newsletter that we&#8217;ve been working on. And it&#8217;s gotten a little bit gnarly with the pandemic. So we are working very hard to get out the new monthly newsletter. And so as soon as we have that together, that&#8217;ll probably go out mid month each month, and just have all kinds of content and news and other kinds of interesting things that we want to share with you all in the newsletter. But either way web and beyond webinars will begin this month. Our first one will actually be this week, this Thursday 11. Five, we&#8217;re going to be doing one on podcast marketing changes, you need to know, again, if you go to W three c inc.com, w three c i nc.com forward slash events, you&#8217;ll find the link to register for it, it&#8217;s free. And you can join us for that, I&#8217;m gonna be talking about all of the various things that have changed over the past year in podcasting, and why you should be paying attention to podcast marketing, then 1119, I&#8217;m going to be covering Google workspace for small business. That is to give everybody updates. G Suite has been rebranded as Google workspace, and there are some really big changes that have happened on that side. So I want to cover that. So Google&#8217;s Google workspace for small business 11 1912. Three, I&#8217;ll be doing a kind of Year in Review year in preview for digital marketing. So small business, digital marketing, and 2021 will be the webinar on December 3, and then we&#8217;ll close out the year with 1217, where I&#8217;ll be doing my lessons from a year of going live. So I&#8217;ve been going live to you all here on YouTube and the other platforms each week, throughout the year. And I&#8217;m going to be giving you my best tips and tricks for what I&#8217;ve learned in this whole process of going live kind of you know, not in obscurity. But I&#8217;ve been doing this to you the small audience that is and has been paying attention to me. And I want to share with you what I&#8217;ve learned, and what I plan to do with this whole live stream program going forward into 2021. And I&#8217;m looking forward to closing out the year. And having that conversation with you all in the web and beyond webinar. If you want to find out about any of these events, stay on top of things and also interact with other small businesses, you probably know that I&#8217;ve launched a community called web and beyond community. And you get to that by going to www dot web and beyond commute dot community. And so if you&#8217;re watching me live, you&#8217;ll see that link on screen, make sure to put in the www, but www dot web and beyond dot community. And that will take you into the community where you&#8217;ll find all the events posted, and you&#8217;ll be able to RSVP to them as we put them out. So please join us lots of fun there to final notes. I wanted to make sure everybody who if you do not have health insurance or health care, insurance, make sure that you know that the open enrollment has begun. So if you go to healthcare.gov, and you&#8217;re a freelancer solopreneur or otherwise, know that open enrollment started. And so it is through December 15, I think you can register so you can get started with your 2021 coverage by going to healthcare.gov and starting the process there. And then last but not least, tomorrow, at least in the United States. It is election day. And so I would be remiss if with my civic duty if I didn&#8217;t let you all know that tomorrow is election day. And obviously, no matter what the political persuasion, voting is important in, you know in every way, especially as it relates to small business, so go out there and vote for the candidate you believe is going to help small business The most and just go vote. So make a plan to vote, go to vote.org and figure it all out. And I look forward to seeing you guys at the polls, hopefully with a mask and socially distance. Raymond Sidney-Smith 35:12 But I wanted to just let you all know about that and make sure that you go out and vote. Okay, we&#8217;ve come to the end of our time together this week for web and beyond live. If you&#8217;ve enjoyed the live stream, please feel free or the video, please feel free to go ahead and hit the thumbs up icon that helps us make new small business friends. And so thank you for doing that. We have a question feel free to leave a comment wherever you might be watching or listening. And of course, I have on Twitter, you can go ahead and you know, tweet at me or you can go ahead and DM me direct message at W the number three so w the number three consulting on Twitter. We come back here every Monday at 11am. Eastern and unless otherwise noted on our social channels for another time. It&#8217;s usually 11am Eastern, and so I look forward to seeing you guys again then. Thank you so much for spending this webinar beyond live with me. I&#8217;m Ray Sidney-Smith on behalf of W three consulting and WCC web services, have a great week ahead marketing and managing on the web and beyond. Take care everybody

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0WM6YdFr7A When you start a business cybersecurity is not usually top-of-mind. However, have you considered how good digital security practices can be a business’s competitive edge?    If not, listen in on this episode! W3 Consulting’s President/CEO Ray Sidney-Smith, in honor of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (October), had the pleasure of bringing to the show Vince Crisler, CEO of Dark Cubed (https://darkcubed.com), a cybersecurity expert with more than 20 years of Information Technology and Cybersecurity leadership in government and private sector roles.   (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://webandbeyondcast.com/ for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Vince Crisler, CEO of Dark Cubed, a cybersecurity expert with more than 20 years of Information Technology and Cybersecurity leadership in government and private sector roles. Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Cybersecurity for Small Business &#8211; Resources Library ( https://w3cinc.com/resources/cybersecurity-for-small-business-resources-library/ ) TwoFactorAuth.org ( https://twofactorauth.org/ ) DarkCubed ( https://darkcubed.com ) Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360b2047" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360b2047" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360b2047" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360b2047" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:06 Welcome, everybody to web and beyond live for this October 26 2020. I&#8217;m Marie Sidney-Smith, President of W three consulting and managing director of WCC web services, which provides affordable web hosting and managed WordPress hosting and domain registration services and all that fun stuff for small business. And so I&#8217;m so excited to have you all here for this edition. As you all know, it is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. And these past few weeks, I have been going through and talking to folks and explaining things all around cybersecurity, so that you can all stay more cyber resilient. And today, I am just really excited. We&#8217;re gonna we&#8217;re gonna cover all kinds of fun things about how to really use cybersecurity as a function for being more cyber resilient, but really using it as a business competitive advantage. Many of us don&#8217;t think about cybersecurity from that perspective. It&#8217;s all fear based, response based, reactionary stuff. And what I really want to do today is really talk about this from a more proactive perspective, and really thinking about this as a pro, as opposed to how to mitigate risk and reaction. And to do that today, I have with me, Vince Crisler, he is the CEO of dark cubed. It is a SaaS tool, and he&#8217;s going to explain it more, I cannot possibly do it justice. But Vince himself is a cybersecurity expert with more than 20 years of information technology and cybersecurity leadership in government and private sector roles. And so with that, I&#8217;m going to bring Vince on ivens How&#8217;s it going? Vince Crisler 1:41 Great. Ray, how are you? Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:42 Good, good. So I cannot possibly do your CV justice. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and, and and what brought you to this point of being the proprietor but also the the brain genius behind dark cubed? Well, thank you for that. You know, I like this, this focus of this overlap of small business and cybersecurity, and I&#8217;ve always been very entrepreneurial, started my first company in high school doing some web design. And I remember getting hired to do this web design for this company in New Jersey. And so as a high schooler driving to New Jersey to talk with a customer is pretty cool. Vince Crisler 2:21 I got into kind of security in it pretty early. A woman in my town, who was also very entrepreneurial, decided to start the first internet service provider in southeastern Ohio. And she hired me as her system, admin, tech support, web design everything else. And so I&#8217;ve been hooked ever since. I&#8217;ve been very fortunate my career to have some really cool opportunities. The first part of my career was active duty Air Force, I was a communications officer got to go to Germany for three years work on some pretty cool missions there. Following Germany, I was sent to the Pentagon where I got to work in the National Military Command Center in the White House, National Military Command Center and Pentagon. Following the Pentagon, I went to the White House communications agency where I got to travel as a presidential communications officer on the road with the President. And then from there, I was loaned as an active duty officer to the White House to be the chief information security officer for the unclassified networks, which was a great eye opening experience a chance to secure one of the most heavily targeted networks in the world, in lock things down and protect things. Following the White House time, I had an opportunity to go over to the Department of Homeland Security and work on some of their National Cybersecurity missions. How do you protect the federal government and critical infrastructure from nation state threats, it was just just a really cool mission, amazing people there. And it was actually during that experience that I kind of started to come up with the foundational ideas for dark cube that kind of had these themes of cybersecurity is too expensive, too complex, there&#8217;s got to be a better way. Most small businesses are left out, you know, if you look at, it&#8217;s a very crowded, noisy cybersecurity market, a lot of marketing a lot of advertising. But I like to say 99% of the companies out there can&#8217;t afford cybersecurity the way it&#8217;s being delivered today. I kinda had a passion to change that. And so I started my own company focused on small and mid sized companies, and how do you rethink the way you deliver cybersecurity? How do you make it accessible to small and mid sized companies? And you know, one of the things that I really enjoy is talking to folks education, talking, you know, how do you take this complex topic that everybody likes to fearmonger around and make it accessible to small business owners? Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:26 Fantastic. Thank you. And this is, as you were all noting why I have Vince here today, I think this is just such a prescient and important aspect of all of our world. And so what I&#8217;ve done is I&#8217;ve broken this down for you all, and we&#8217;re getting lots of chats in the messages with people with wild faces for you. So thank you to everybody who&#8217;s engaging and if you have questions, feel free to throw them into the you know, we have multiple tools where people are watching so those who are watching from the webinar chat, you have your q&#38;a panel, you can feel free to throw questions in there. For Vince as we make our way through our time together, but just to start out here, I thought we would kind of bucket this into three different areas where competitive advantage can be utilized. First up is productivity. And in that space where business productivity can be conditioned, and then we can talk about public relations and marketing. And then we can close out with kind of employee issues, which which can be attraction, retention and engagement. And so just like starting right off at the bat, let&#8217;s talk about profitability, and how productivity can be garnered from that. And so I wanted to start off with the kind of the toughest question up front, which is, what do you say, to the SMB owner to the small business owner who says, You know what, I can save money by not investing in cybersecurity? We&#8217;re, we&#8217;re not we&#8217;re not really at risk. And what do we do to for those folks? What what&#8217;s the best argument for the pro side? Not the, yeah, you&#8217;re at risk, you&#8217;re going to be attacked, you&#8217;re already being attacked all of those things? what&#8217;s the what&#8217;s the, what&#8217;s the argument for cybersecurity in the positive sense? Well, there are a couple of answers. One is you may be absolutely right, there may be no reason you need to invest in cybersecurity at all. But as a business owner, you know, you may not be an expert in technology, you may not be an expert in cybersecurity, and when you hear cybersecurity, you know, people on the news and other places say there&#8217;s only two types of businesses, those have been hacked, and those that don&#8217;t know they have, right, that&#8217;s all fear mongering, and you know, what business owners are really good at intuitively, whether you realize it or not, is risk management. So when you think about operating your business, you know, you have customers, you have products and services that you have to deliver, and you manage risks all day, every day, you know, in terms of supply chain in terms of how you&#8217;re advertising, how you&#8217;re marketing, how you&#8217;re budgeting, how you&#8217;re planning. And so pitching cybersecurity as a risk management discussion, lets you make an informed decision. So, you know, do you have financial records? Do you process payments? Do you have healthcare records? Do you have sensitive information, you know, personally identifiable information, which is a lot of times name, social security number, date of birth? Do you interact with these sorts of data as a part of your day to day job? And if the answer is yes, then you have compliance risk rate, if that data gets out, it could cost you money, it could cost you legal issues. And so you need to think about ways to manage that risk. Do you have intellectual property? Do you have something that makes your business special, that if that information got released publicly, it would impact your business? And if so, you need to think about ways to protect that. And you know, there are lots of ways in there are cyber things that can get that information out. And so, rather than trying to sell on fear mongering, I like to kind of have that discussion with small business owners around, you know, what matters to your business. And if you if you&#8217;re touching, nothing, nothing sensitive. If there&#8217;s no no compliance information at all, and you run all of your stuff off of one account, and you have to factor setup, then maybe you don&#8217;t need to spend on security. But maybe you do. Yeah. And I always I always put it from the perspective that, you know, I&#8217;m I&#8217;m teaching digital marketing and productivity so often. And what I try to explain to people is that business, data driven business decisions are always going to be more powerful than ones done in the darkness. You know, people always ask me, what, who&#8217;s my target audience? I don&#8217;t know who my target audience is. And I always say, Well, what does the data say? Are you collecting the right data to be able to get the right answers? And cybersecurity good cybersecurity practices gives you more data, it gives you more ability to make those kinds of competitive analyses. And so why wouldn&#8217;t you? Why wouldn&#8217;t you make those right? Best calls for the business from a data driven perspective? And so I love that this leads us right into kind of my next question here, which is that I was recently reading somewhere I forget online about how insurance companies are doing showdown scans. And for everyone&#8217;s edification, if you don&#8217;t know what showdown is, if you go to showdown.io. It&#8217;s a tool that will allow you to basically look for various types of services and ports on systems, basically, you can look at the open web and see what is available in that space. And it can be very eye opening, go to monitor.showdown.io. And you can actually see various parts of your own network that can be that is publicly available and potentially susceptible online to risk. But anyway, these insurance companies are doing showdown scans, before issuing insurance policies, and and so like before issuing insurance quotes and policies, and I&#8217;m curious how business owners kind of take advantage of this. You know, what, what&#8217;s kind of the advantage to them in that in that side? Vince Crisler 9:39 Yeah, this is a good complicated question. You know, insurance. You know, this from other parts of your business is about transferring risk to a third party. So there&#8217;s DNO insurance, there&#8217;s car insurance, there&#8217;s health insurance, and there&#8217;s cyber insurance. And so you know, if you&#8217;re one of those companies that&#8217;s impacted by compliance, compliance issues, if you have data that could cause significant financial harm to your company, if that data were breached, then you need to be asking questions about, you know, can you transfer that risk to insurance company? And what the insurance company then is going to say is, you know, what sort of risk Do you present as a company? And they&#8217;re going to look at things like, what is your revenue? How many records do you have? Do you have 1000 Records, medical records? Or do you have a million medical records? Do you have PCI data, payment card information data. And so as a part of that risk discussion with your insurance company, a lot of times what they&#8217;re trying to do to accelerate the, the writing process of getting you a policy is they&#8217;re gonna say, what what external risk factors exist about your business. And that&#8217;s where showed in comes into play, if your infrastructure is heavily exposed, and you&#8217;re not locked down, then they&#8217;re going to be able to see it. And they&#8217;re using, they&#8217;re actually using tools like bitsight, and Cisco security scorecard, which wrap this stuff up in even at a higher level. And so as a company, if you&#8217;re thinking of pursuing cyber insurance, you need to understand how they&#8217;re going to price those policies. So if you are, if you create a bigger risk, it&#8217;s going to cost you more so so you can take advantage of this process by understanding what they&#8217;re looking at. So do do a scan on your your company and see what shows up. Things like your email infrastructure, these are really important. There are some these terms get pretty technical. And if you have an IT department, have them help you. If you have a managed service provider, they should already answer this for you. But things like SPF records and DKM, how do you authenticate your mail server that the mail is coming from you? Those are things that insurance companies will look like look at and could change your the price of your premium. And they&#8217;re easy things to fix. And so you know, thinking about what are those? What are the ways you&#8217;re exposed externally on the internet? And how do you reduce that exposure? Yeah, and like you just noted SPF and demark, and DKM, all of those email policies that you set up are also good for email deliverability. So you know, the better you set yourself up, the better, you can get your marketing messages out to people both. Remember that when you set up your email tools, you need to make sure that emails and deliverable between one to one communications, but also in your email marketing service provider tools, so that they also have those right policies set up. And those are things that are exposed as you&#8217;re going through these insurance quotes and insurance, policy provisioning. So I think that&#8217;s really, really exciting. Now, I think, because it actually helps to go ahead and have the insurance companies know as much as they do. I mean, there&#8217;s, there&#8217;s always a sense of culpability there, right. Because, you know, the more insurance companies know, the more they can deny you, or terminate a policy or deny a claim, having been both an insurance producer in the past, I&#8217;ve been licensed as an insurance producer, in a very narrow field of real estate, title insurance. But having been an insurance producer before, as well as having worked to, in a litigation sense, against large insurance companies. I&#8217;ve been on both sides of this, you know, knowing what it&#8217;s like to be able to do it. But what I&#8217;ve always understood is that the more you know, as you said, Vince, about insurance and the process, the better your business is going to be. Because you&#8217;re going to know the the both the risk, but also the possibilities to work through the system to get better at the end at the end of the day. And I&#8217;m just not talking about insurance issues, but also in the compliance space. I wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, there&#8217;s, there are new laws coming up on the books all the time. You know, we&#8217;ve seen several, just in the last two years crop up in the United States, but we&#8217;re seeing more and more compliance issues. We have data breach notification laws, we have data privacy and rights laws that are not yet codified on on the federal level, but certainly state by state now, with California being kind of the strongest one, recently releasing these these kinds of data protection pieces, and then we have data protection laws just generally that are that are on the books. What What do you feel like is kind of the the area where businesses can grow best in these processes? From a from a real productivity perspective? What What can they do? I know, I have my own thoughts, but I&#8217;m curious what yours are? Well, there are a couple of pieces to this discussion. One is as a security practitioner, I think it&#8217;s clear to articulate that compliance and security are not equal. Because you&#8217;re compliant does not mean you&#8217;re secure, because you&#8217;re secure does not mean you&#8217;re compliant. And so as a business owner, you need to treat these as separate but related buckets of activity. With respect to compliance, you know, you mentioned there, there is no national standard on data privacy, data breach notification, in compliance. And so, you know, if you&#8217;re a small business that works on one state, you should understand the laws and requirements of your state and how your attorney general thinks about these problems. And there are a lot of great resources on the internet, kind of around data compliance and data breach privacy laws. If you operate in multiple states, it becomes very difficult because you have to you have to understand the nuances of those laws in every state and you know, we work with health care coverage. needs that operate in 30 or 40 different states and, you know, to think about managing 30 or 40 different sets of rules. And you know what one Wednesday may consider a breach and other might not what the reporting process could be different in one state to another. And so there&#8217;s a work in there and in the first piece of that discussion is to understand what part of your business touch from a couple touches compliance, right. And again, if your healthcare, it&#8217;s pretty easy. If your financial services, it&#8217;s pretty easy. If you do your own internal health care, like your own internal management for your employees, you may have a lot of data, that PII data on your systems that could be affected by compliance. And, you know, we&#8217;ve seen plenty of great examples where an HR person will have all the records for the company on a laptop, that laptop gets gets stolen. Well, you have to report that to the state because that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s a loss. And so how do you manage that risk? Things like encryption certainly help. Yeah. And I guess the other thing is looking at kind of where we&#8217;re headed. And you look at what&#8217;s happening in Europe, with GD GDP are the general data protection regulation. And, you know, that&#8217;s a model of how to start to think about requiring data protection is this model that this sensitive data to belongs to you as an individual, and companies have access to it, but they have to manage that appropriately. And so as we see, as that gets pushed to United States, you know, you mentioned California with their consumer Privacy Act, the California consumer Privacy Act, ccpa. That&#8217;s kind of the most forward leaning, and I expect more states to start following suit. I mean, there are certainly a lot of industry groups that are trying to push for this idea of a national law that codifies and unifies all of these approaches to make it easier on small and medium businesses. Yeah, we have the Uniform Commercial Code, we have the uniform trust code, you know, we have all of these various uniform codes, and they&#8217;re always, you know, mildly changed here or there between states. And I think it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s about time that businesses have, really, it&#8217;s less regulatory hurdle, when you can have a centralized, you know, code to work from. And so if any of you are watching, go out there and lobby your representatives to support. There are several bills in Congress right now that are focused on this and support a bill. You know, it doesn&#8217;t matter what the law says, as long as it is one that you have to comply by, as opposed to many, many, and I&#8217;m being somewhat facetious there, I will note for So folks, if you, if you&#8217;re looking, I did create a cybersecurity resources library, if you go to W three c Inc, W the number three c i NC comm over resources drop down, you&#8217;ll see a cybersecurity small business resources library, and there on the site, you can sign up and access it, it has access to all of the current data breach notification laws, I kind of you know, tried to put them all together in one space for you all. So you can go ahead and check that out. And, and so, moving right along, then you started to touch on this and kind of and I know that breaking this into three different sections is really tough because they kind of meld into one another. But I wanted to make our way into public relations and marketing. And that&#8217;s the space I spend in the most. So I&#8217;ll try to keep my comments limited. So they but But the idea here is that we have the immense opportunity, I think, in the cybersecurity space. And you know, I&#8217;m not a cybersecurity practitioner, you know, I&#8217;m on the outside. I&#8217;m a super geek. So I just love knowing all these things about cybersecurity. But it makes so much sense because people are doing marketing, they say oh my gosh, my Twitter account has been hacked into I get all of those questions. You know, my website&#8217;s been hacked into and being in the web hosting space, we get a lot of discussion about that. I&#8217;m curious, how can small businesses use cybersecurity practices, good cyber hygiene, to increase their audience? How can they use it from a marketing perspective? So So branding and marketing is all about establishing you and your company in the marketplace? Right? So what do you stand for? How do customers think about you? And you know, if you&#8217;re a dry cleaner, or an accounting firm, you know, there are certain messages you want to include in that marketing in terms of how you think about protecting, protecting your customers. You know, you mentioned some of a lot of these tools and getting hacked, we worked I worked a hack where you know, this this group got their Facebook account hacked, it got taken over by some some actors and started to put horrible messaging up on their site. pictures that they couldn&#8217;t take down it was it was just disgusting. And it all came because they didn&#8217;t have two factor authentication in place. And so you know, I&#8217;m going to take a moment here to kind of push like my number one rule in cybersecurity. It&#8217;s it&#8217;s not foolproof, but you know, if you&#8217;re doing you know, whether it&#8217;s your email, your digital marketing or any of these platforms turn on two factor authentication. Because getting having somebody steal your password is a pretty easy task from an attacker perspective. And so get two factor authentication turned on. Make sure that on platforms like like Facebook, you have delegate setup that can If something happens, they can actually get in and lock that account down for you. It is really difficult once the breach or the compromise happens on a platform like Facebook or Twitter to get it back, it takes a while. And there&#8217;s there&#8217;s not a streamlined, easy process. So going back to your original question around kind of increasing your audience using cybersecurity, I think a lot of it depends on you know, what type of business you are, you know, if you&#8217;re an accounting firm, you have access to a lot of small businesses that are that are facing threats, things like business email compromise, we see it in the news all the time where, you know, the the person in, in finance and accounting gets an email from their CEO that says, hey, I need you to transfer, you know, $100,000 to this account, and they do it and that money&#8217;s gone, and small businesses impacted significantly, and may even go out of business. And so, you know, if you have customers that are in the small business world, taking a moment out to educate, and train them and get them resources just builds a better relationship between you and your customers. It also shows kind of that you&#8217;re being responsible, and there are so many resources out there from a training and education perspective that delivering this to your customers is pretty easy these days. So think about ways to kind of establish your brand and reputation there. So that&#8217;s kind of my, my key focus. Absolutely. I mean, all of you watching or listening, don&#8217;t you like me more, because I&#8217;m helping you be more cybersecurity? No, but it&#8217;s, but it&#8217;s a reality factor, right. And in this age of COVID-19, and the pandemic, you know, safety and affordability are the two primary marketing messages that really work well, for good reason and and, and, and good, both ethical and probably moral reasons. But what we see here is that if we can push a message, message of safety across the board, and say, we&#8217;re not just being safe, because of this public health crisis, we&#8217;re being saved across the board, physical security, digital security, as well as your health and safety, as well as the health and safety of our employees. When we get to talking about that, you know, all of these pieces blend into both the brand messaging the ongoing messages of the company, and work gets out. I mean, you know, word is, you know, spreads really quickly among people, when you&#8217;re doing the right things. And when you&#8217;re doing the wrong things. And just staying on the side of the right things, I think it&#8217;s just so powerful when you can do the right things and have that message be heard by your audience. So I really, really recognize that we can, we can put together some light touch mechanisms for being able to get the message accountant, if you all have questions about that, feel free to reach out, I&#8217;m happy to talk to you about what good messaging you can do related to how you are keeping your your customers data, your vendors data, all of the various stakeholders data, safe and secure, and, and how that can actually help you actually grow trust and credibility across the board. And we&#8217;re going to talk a little bit about that in just a bit. So I wanted to see if you had any examples of innovations and companies that were spurred on by cybersecurity, and I&#8217;m thinking of, you know, in your work and time in cybersecurity, you must have seen something where people started off thinking, Okay, we&#8217;ve got to create a more cybersecurity friendly environment here, we have to lock down the system because of x. And it actually, like maybe person a new product or birth, the new service line, or the the division or department made a fundamental change that was really positive on the other side. any examples that you have for us that you can think of? Yeah, so I think, you know, taking a stand on the security side is important. You know, things like, you know, if you&#8217;ve heard of Twilio is a platform, they do a lot of messaging pushing they, they&#8217;re basically a telco in the cloud, where you can do phone, you can do texting, all sorts of automation, you know, they&#8217;ve taken a stand to basically make two factor authentication required. And, you know, steps like that, that, you know, I think industry will catch up, it&#8217;s a no brainer, that two factor is going to be required at some point soon, but taking a stand on some of these security issues, because you&#8217;re looking out for your customers, you know, just gets you noticed, and it you know, any, any, you kind of have this idea that any press is good press, and I maybe not in a breach, but but ways to get noticed as a business to say, look, we&#8217;re gonna, we care about our customers so much, that we&#8217;re going to take these extra steps to make things more secure, and we&#8217;re going to push information out. And we certainly see and we&#8217;re working with organizations, you know, there&#8217;s a very large insurance company in the US called Gallagher insurance that we&#8217;re working with, where, you know, we&#8217;re collaborating with them to deliver, you know, more affordable security to their customers. And so that&#8217;s an example where, you know, they&#8217;re finding partners in the space to compliment them to deliver better products and services to their customers. And so these are all ways that you can build your brand and build messaging and get get folks more secure as at the same time. Yeah, I&#8217;ve seen definitely in this age of the pandemic spur innovation, like I&#8217;ve Never seen before, in, you know, 25 years of watching small businesses develop and grow. And what I have learned in this timeframe is that, you know, necessity is a great driver. And what businesses can do in this point in time, is while you&#8217;re already doing all of this work to become more digitally aware, and building your digital presence, if you just add a little bit of cybersecurity in there, you will find that there are things that because of the limitations, right, you know, we always talk about in the cybersecurity space, at least always talks about the the trade off of security and convenience, right? If you can really make your product more convenient in the face of more security, then you really have a true competitive advantage. Thinking about curbside delivery and local delivery and things in which you know, otherwise would be, you know, just a necessitating factor, if you can think about how you are doing that in such a way that actually protects client data. And you can message that appropriately, that can actually be really, really powerful for people, in a lot of ways. So I&#8217;m just I&#8217;m really, I&#8217;m really bullish on that whole concept of pushing that message, completely agree. Okay, moving right along to building trust and brand strength, because it&#8217;s an area that I spend a lot of time with clients working on, through the economic development agencies that I work for, and so on and so forth. And I always wonder, how did how do small businesses, small and medium sized enterprises really communicate cybersecurity to past present and potential customers, so that they can build a greater trust and brand strength? What What is, you know, being on the inside, watching how people lose trust and lose credibility very quickly in that space? What&#8217;s the flip side message to that? How do you put that on the other side, so that businesses can communicate? Again, like I said, in those three kind of time zones of past, present, and potential, how do they communicate to those folks? in such a way that&#8217;s positive? Unknown Speaker 26:57 Yeah. And I, Vince Crisler 26:57 you know, again, going back to this whole idea of risk management and managing your company and your brand and your reputation and the trust of those, you know, past current and future employees or future customers. You know, I think one thing that&#8217;s really important is, you know, while I while I kind of bad mouth fearmongering, a little bit early on, I think there also has to be a realistic expectation that something&#8217;s going to happen to your business at some point. Right. And so, you know, hopefully, it&#8217;s not ransomware. But it could be, you know, a phishing attack, what if your email account gets compromised, and a nasty message goes out to all of your customers? So you know, thinking as a leadership group, and you&#8217;re, you know, whether it&#8217;s one or two of you, or five of you in your business, thinking through one of those scenarios that would cause your business harm. So, you know, what happened to what happened if all of your systems got locked down, and somebody was asking you to pay $20,000 to get it back? Or more? Right. And I think the average ransom right now is around $100,000. At $200,000. What would you do as a company? If you had a data breach? How would you communicate to that to your customers? How would you react? And I think, you know, in some ways, you know, this is the unforgotten pieces. How do you do branding and marketing and PR after a breach, and if you&#8217;re not prepared for that, before the breach, you&#8217;re going to be, you know, playing catch up. And that&#8217;s not where you want to be playing catch up in a bad in, in a bad situation like a data breach. So I would strongly encourage that you think about, you know, can you do that internally? Do you have the right marketing? Folks, you have the right PR folks internally to support that messaging? And what does that messaging look like? Start writing it now? because that&#8217;ll get you thinking about what those risks look like, if you don&#8217;t have that internal support? Who do you reach out to for that support? What are the groups in your area that understand PR and marketing and legal support for cybersecurity breaches, you don&#8217;t have to spend money, right? You don&#8217;t have to spend a lot of time, you just have to identify those resources and say, Hey, do you guys do? Do you guys do or do you guys know if somebody that does marketing after a data breach, get introduced to them understand? The other thing I like to recommend is, you know, there&#8217;s this whole term of tabletop exercises. And it can be very complicated. But it can also be writing down three questions that you&#8217;re going to sit down, I normally would say we&#8217;re a bag lunch now I&#8217;d say over over a zoom or a WebEx and just ask your team a couple of questions. You know, if question one, we got, we got a ransomware attack that locked all of our laptops. Is that a problem or not? Right? Do we have a backup? Yeah. And we&#8217;re backing up every night? Oh, do we realize that if we&#8217;re backing up every night, all of those backups are probably encrypted as well? Do we have an offline backup somewhere? No. Okay, let&#8217;s make an offline backup. Right? So just a couple of simple questions can make the difference between your business going under and your business being able to fight through and survive. Having the right PR and marketing support set up ahead of time can be the difference between a very, very rough experience and a positive experience where you&#8217;re able to communicate to your customers that if this happens to a lot of businesses, we We&#8217;re ready. This is how we&#8217;re protecting you and taking care of you. Again, that&#8217;s the difference between losing your company and not in a lot of situations. Absolutely. And and yeah, I don&#8217;t think fear mongering is necessary to understand that it is a win. Not if proposition when it comes to cybersecurity attacks, we are all under attack. And that is because we are low hanging fruit. And easily, easily susceptible. Right? You know, I said this actually last week, and I&#8217;ll repeat myself, because this is so important. There are people whose job it is to show up every day and attack you, right? while you&#8217;re out there showing up every day to serve your community through your small business products and services. There are some poor schlub, who shows up every day and some large server farm in some other country who sits down and says, Okay, how do I break into your business today? You know, they&#8217;re probably given a list of IP addresses and list of business names. And they get to just go look for low hanging fruit. And so it&#8217;s really important for us to think not about the oh my god part of this, right? There&#8217;s this fanfare that&#8217;s around it, forget all that, forget the fear mongering, you just understand this is a risk you are under attack, how do you deal with that attack. And just by virtue of doing that, you can go out there and say, to your past customers, we are protecting your data. And this is how we&#8217;re doing it, going to your current customers and saying, you know, what, we have to implement these kinds of practices, because we want to make sure that while we&#8217;re working with you, we&#8217;re not susceptible to this attack that&#8217;s ongoing. And then to future customers, you can say, if you do business with me, I am going to do my best to make sure that you&#8217;re secure. And does that mean that like me, once in a while, maybe more than once in a while, people send me an email, and I don&#8217;t get it. Because it&#8217;s been quarantined. And I don&#8217;t check my quarantine email, as often as I probably should, you know, okay, that&#8217;s fine. But what I do tell them is when I do finally excise that email from wherever it came from, I can say, you know what that was in in pursuit of making sure that we stayed more secure. And by the way, you don&#8217;t have DKM, or demark, or SPF applied on your systems, and that will make you better by doing so. And it becomes an educational moment. So I just really think across the board, people feel more trusting and your brand benefits from that trust, by virtue of communicating on a regular basis that you&#8217;re thinking about them, it&#8217;s not just about you, right, it&#8217;s about them, when it comes to that kind of thing. And talking about them in kind of a transition to employees, many times in small businesses, you know, I deal with a lot of micro printers, a lot of solopreneurs. And then, you know, kind of smaller than 10, maybe sometimes smaller than 25, employee own employee businesses. And when it comes to that perspective, they&#8217;re kind of two umbrellas here, right? There are the businesses that choose to, you know, basically fear and shame, you know, the fear and shame part of if you, if you do this, you&#8217;re gonna ruin our business, right. So they make sure their employees are scared to death of technology, generally, when employees generally are not the most tech savvy people in the first place, they&#8217;re just everyday people, you know, go to work, and they want to do their job. And technology is a part of it. But it&#8217;s not like, you know, they&#8217;re out caring about the latest iPhone or the latest, you know, Google Pixel device, you know, they&#8217;re, they&#8217;re just, you know, average people. And then once in a while, there&#8217;s a cybersecurity event. And someone has made an example of, we go out there and we say, Oh, you know, you know, Jane, you did this, and you&#8217;re going to be fired for doing this. And I&#8217;m just really curious, from your experience. How can businesses flip the script on that? How can they support people more, to be able to make sure they benefit from cybersecurity practices? And even when incidents happen, right, like, when when a mistake happens? How can businesses kind of do differently? be better? As they say? A lot? It&#8217;s a great question. You know, there are a couple of things. I think, one, you know, nobody goes to work saying, you know, about nobody, but most people do not go to work saying I want to find a way to screw over my company, right? I want to find a way to open every bad email and get get computer&#8217;s infected and cause problems. You know, people generally, the non disgruntled ones, generally want to do good for their company and support their company. And so with that in mind, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s up to the company to be responsible to give those employees the tools to be responsible and to be helpful. And, you know, the thing that always frustrates me as a security practitioner, when I&#8217;m talking with companies is when you when you let the security team go too far to the extreme of security. What it does is it prevents people from doing their job. And people just want to do their job, they want to do what&#8217;s right. And they&#8217;re going to find a way to do it, whether you let them or not. And if you have things locked down to the point that they can&#8217;t even do some basic job functions, they&#8217;re going to go around you and you know, that could result in a breach or compromise as a result. And it&#8217;s, again, it&#8217;s not because they&#8217;re trying to do harm. It&#8217;s because they&#8217;re just trying to take care of a customer or take care of a client or take care of a business partner. And so, you know, one is, is getting in the mindset of security as a collaboration with business. Right and IT security is an enabler, it&#8217;s to make sure that you&#8217;re, you&#8217;re managing the rest of your company, you&#8217;re managing the the integrity of the information, you&#8217;re keeping that information private, that needs to be held private. The other thing I&#8217;d say here is, you know, none of us like, except for some, some people that like really like pain, and suffering, none of us like to sit through cbts, like computer based training on security, and to say that your company forces you to sit through an hour of computer based training, that&#8217;s exactly the same every year, and you&#8217;re going to click through, like, that&#8217;s not fun. It&#8217;s not educational. And so being creative about ways to train and educate thinking about a continuous training environment where, you know, you&#8217;re you&#8217;re getting your company into a cycle where you know, every other week or once a month, you&#8217;re kind of introducing topics as part of a longer term program is really helpful. And one of the things I really like to do, especially when you look at the small end of business, is, you know, you&#8217;ve got people working on their own own laptops, their own computers, they&#8217;re working from home, they&#8217;re working from coffee shops, maybe not anymore, but someday we will work from coffee shops again. And, you know, they&#8217;re they&#8217;re just trying to do their job. And so how do you? How do you think about a culture of security in a small business where you don&#8217;t have a chief information security officer in a security operation center? And in from that context, right, like to get people is? How do you educate your kids? How do you educate your parents. So if you reach out to your employees with resources to say, Hey, here&#8217;s some really great cybersecurity tips that you can talk to your kids about, here are some great cybersecurity resources that you can take to your parents, because, you know, the elderly population tends to be more targeted with scams, these computer tech support scams and other things that are hitting them, and causing significant financial harm and pain and suffering. And so here&#8217;s Here are ways that you can train those folks. And I&#8217;ve seen employees latch on to that, because everybody likes to train and help other people, nobody likes to be trained, and, you know, getting your employees resources to take care of their kids and train their kids, they&#8217;re going to learn more from doing that than they ever would from getting, you know, a lecture from your company. So finding ways to partner and be more creative about spreading the message in the company is really important, especially down market, Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:12 that is a fantastic idea, and I am going to steal it. Because I really love the idea of helping help having them help others. That&#8217;s a really great, you know, way to demonstrate cybersecurity practices. In that vein, kind of nice segue here, which is that, you know, for many small businesses, as I said, Before, I deal with a lot of micro printers and a lot of small enterprises. And many times the staff are small, they&#8217;re family members, right? Whether the business is family owned or not, it&#8217;s sometimes many times a family business, because you know, a spouse or a partner is entrenched in, you know, dealing with things. Maybe they&#8217;re the other admin on the Facebook page, you know, that just happens. It&#8217;s just a virtue of being small and not having enough people to go around. And I&#8217;m curious from like, investors, vendors and other stakeholders, how can we make the entire company think of cybersecurity as a competitive advantage in terms of strategy? Like, what are some things that you can, in terms of high level talk to people about to get them on board in terms of, Okay, we&#8217;re gonna we&#8217;re gonna adopt cybersecurity as a competitive advantage. x. Vince Crisler 38:26 Yeah, you know, the easiest path to this discussion is talking about the financial impact, right? Like, the fact that a breach or a compromise could cost us $100,000. And with the margins that we have, that could put us out of business. So you&#8217;re getting people to understand that there is true financial harm, and you talk to the poor schlep at the server farm, a lot of times these guys are making tons of money. It&#8217;s a great job. Hacking small businesses, you can make a ton of money really fast, and they&#8217;re not just targeting you. I mean, there, there&#8217;s a misconception that there&#8217;s a hacker that&#8217;s targeting your restaurant or your law firm. You know, typically, that&#8217;s not the case. Because that doesn&#8217;t make sense financially. What they&#8217;re doing is they&#8217;re hitting 5000 companies with the same email and hoping for one or two hits. And when they get a hit, they have a fully automated process, they go off on to take advantage of that, of that, that hit. And so understanding that it&#8217;s kind of an asymmetric threat where these folks are targeting a ton of companies and you&#8217;re just going to be collateral damage because they can make money off of you. When you think about the the compliance world if you&#8217;re in a in a business that has some compliance concerns, I think this is another place where it&#8217;s more obvious to have a competitive advantage where you can message message, your security, your approach, tie that into your brand, it makes a huge difference. There are programs emerging right now such as the cybersecurity Maturity Model certification within the Department of Defense cmmc. There&#8217;s a chance that that can apply to up to 300,000 companies that are in kind of the umbrella of the defense industrial base that are doing business with Department of Defense. Those require moments are going to flow through the very large contractors all the way down to the very small companies. And just so people are aware, that means that if you are and I know a lot of you who are watching are in the ad space, that may mean that that might apply to you even though you may not think about it. So Exactly. And so you know, paying attention this emmc. And it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s pretty, there&#8217;s a lot of noise and information out there. But from a competitive advantage, I would say, you know, if you actually look at the security controls that are built into CMC, and it looks big and complex, but if you actually read through it, it&#8217;s not all that all that complicated. They&#8217;re things you should be doing anyways. And so people are getting caught up in the news about will cmmc actually work or not, will it fall apart? Who knows? I to me, what I would say, and I&#8217;m working with companies that are going down this path right now is, regardless of whether cmmc goes forward, there is value in terms of thinking about security from that model, if you want to do business with the government. Right now, it&#8217;s Department of Defense focus. But if you&#8217;re working with Treasury, or FAA, or Homeland Security, or any of these other groups, this stuff is coming down the road at some point. And so it&#8217;s a competitive advantage for you to get ahead of that. So if if cmmc comes through, and you can say, look, level three is kind of the middle of the MMC and we are already CMC level three compliant, that gives you a leg up in those contracting discussions, it makes you look more proactive, as a parent, as opposed to those companies that may try to slam in at the last minute to be able to get into a contract that they want to get into. So from the compliance side, you know, certainly thinking about trends and patterns, and where these things are going and how you&#8217;re aligning your business can be a huge competitive advantage. And the final thing I&#8217;d say here is, you know, when we&#8217;re looking at this world of COVID, and kind of the lockdowns that have happened, a lot of businesses and functions are moving online that were never online. A lot of restaurants, a lot of other organizations are putting services and capability online that weren&#8217;t there before. Because it&#8217;s essential to do your business. And you know, integrating services like like stripe and other services that handle the payment stuff for you gets rid of that regulatory burden a lot of ways. And so you know, thinking about how you deploy those technologies is really important. And it not only is going to streamline your business, but it&#8217;s going to help you from a compliance and regulation perspective, and it will make you more competitive in the market. Raymond Sidney-Smith 42:21 Yeah, I remember when the glba came out, this is back in before the year 2000. For those of you who are watching who may be younger, but you know, 1999, the gramm Leach bliley act was a financial institution based, you know, bipartisan legislation. But of course, it was only relegated to financial institutions, you know, those who had touched the financial services space. And I said, at that point, you know, if you followed the glba, you&#8217;re gonna be better off in business, not just now, but 510 and 20 years from now. And here we are on the cusp of those who are in California now are basically applying the glba to their businesses. So really listen to what Vince is saying here, because this is coming down the pike, it&#8217;s going to touch more businesses than you think. And to be quite honest, it&#8217;s it&#8217;s the right ethical thing to do for your business for your customers and across the board. But it&#8217;s also going to be ultimately good for your business, because you&#8217;re going to save yourself, the productivity hit, right, the downtime, and potentially the loss of business, and the loss of your business at some point, if that&#8217;s the case. So it all kind of works itself out in in in the long run in terms of the good in the end, the other side, I wanted to I wanted to just ask you, Vince, if there&#8217;s anything I missed, was there anything here in terms of competitive advantage that you think of that may have been a missing element in kind of these three buckets of productivity, Public Relations and Marketing, and then employee attraction, retention and engagement? I think we covered a lot of ground here, it&#8217;s been great Ray, I think, you know, I just want to reinforce this two factor authentication. Vince Crisler 43:56 If you don&#8217;t know what I&#8217;m talking about, go on Google and look at it. Your personal accounts, your company accounts, should have two factor authentication turned on. If your financial institution doesn&#8217;t support two factor authentication through their website, look at a different financial institution. If you&#8217;re using a managed service provider that doesn&#8217;t use two factor authentication on some of their management platforms, you should look at a different managed service provider. It is again, it&#8217;s not there, there are ways to defeat it. But it makes the job a lot harder for an attacker. And so, you know, I just think, you know, what are the basics and, you know, this is where I get to a lot of resources. And Ray, you talked about some of the resources you have available on our dark queue on our website, dark cube.com we actually have a cyber security resources page. So you go to dark cube that comm resources and there&#8217;s a whole page of information available. And we put that up there. You know, there&#8217;s there&#8217;s no benefit to us other than making it available for you all to do your jobs better. So really pay attention to kind of those this quick and easy things you can do to lock down and secure your business and protect your customers. Protect your employees. and protect your business and your livelihood. Yeah, I just wanted to bring up on screen this site at two factor auth.org is what Vince was talking about in terms of your the capability of you being able to go in and determine whether or not your financial services agency, institution or otherwise has he considered his banking here. And there&#8217;s all kinds of other financial and legal sites here, you can just type the name in and see whether or not and how to set up either to fee to FA two factor authentication or multi factor authentication on your service. So just know that that exists. And it&#8217;s out there, and really, really helpful for being able to do that. That being the case, but I wanted to give a few minutes to you to kind of explain to folks what dark cubed does, how it works, and, and how it can help small businesses who are really, in that space of interested in becoming more cyber aware, and cyber secure in this kind of age of digital retail experience. Yeah, so we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re a cybersecurity software as a service company, we are focused on simplifying the ability to detect when when bad things are happening and stop it. We primarily partner with managed service providers, and there&#8217;s managed service providers are supporting small and mid sized companies, they&#8217;re managing their firewalls, they&#8217;re managing their their desktops and laptops and making sure that you can do your job. And then we also work with small and midsize companies that do their own IT infrastructure. And when I look at kind of the landscape of cybersecurity, you know, the foundational requirement, if you have a network and you have computers on that network, as you purchase, you probably have a firewall of some sort. And that firewall is kind of a gate to keep the good, allow the good traffic through in the bad traffic to stop the bad traffic. But a lot of times these firewalls require a lot of sophistication and expertise to manage. And it&#8217;s really hard to do the job really well with just a firewall. When you go up market, you hear terms like security operations centers, and threat intelligence, and analysts and all of these functionality that, you know, if a firewall was sufficient, you wouldn&#8217;t need all these other things. But as you go up market, you find folks need to invest in that because it&#8217;s a necessary step. So what do you do about the gap? What do you do about all these companies that that can afford a firewall or should put a firewall in place, and those people that that can afford a security operation center and analysts and all the time, energy and money that takes and that&#8217;s where we fit in is to say, you know, a lot of the functionality that a security operation center performs, can be taken care of, by automation can be taken care of, by analytics can be taken care of by a creative solution, like dark cube. And so we integrate into your firewall, there&#8217;s no hardware or software to deploy, in a matter of five to 10 minutes, we can be up and running, we can detect, you know, we can look at what&#8217;s coming in and out of your network, we can detect the bad stuff, we can block it, and help you move on, we can do nice reporting and analytics around it. So it&#8217;s been really neat to see kind of fitting into a very noisy, crowded market into a space that&#8217;s relatively uncovered by a lot of other products and services. And to do it at a price point that works for this for the small and mid market is pretty cool. And going back to what I said in the beginning, you know, my passion is really about helping small and midsize companies. And, Unknown Speaker 48:08 you know, I think it&#8217;s, Raymond Sidney-Smith 48:09 you know, in some ways, incredibly frustrating that, you know, you can have the large banks and the large government contractors can spend, you know, half a billion to a billion dollars a year on security and still not be completely secure. And everybody else has just told, like, if you can&#8217;t spend a lot of money on security, you&#8217;re being irresponsible. And I think that&#8217;s the wrong thing to do. It&#8217;s up to us technologists to solve this problem for small and midsize companies and creative ways. And that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re doing. Yeah, and I just wanted to point this out. And, you know, because I think that would Vince is doing and with dark cubed is doing generally is available out there there are there are companies doing this kind of work to make it less onerous on you. And I know I&#8217;ve talked in the last two episodes about some of the tools that are out there. Dark cubed is among those that I think is really important for us to be able to reduce the the burden on us while still staying affordable and making it possible for us all to basically stay in that space. And so with that I wanted to one Thank you, Vince for joining me here on ledger. Yeah, on the show. And where can people keep up to date with dark cube and with you? Yeah, so we&#8217;re on you know, our website is dark, keep calm. We&#8217;re also on Twitter at Vince Crisler, and we&#8217;re at dark cube cyber on Twitter. So come follow us. Join us. connect with me on LinkedIn. You know, I always encourage folks to go on LinkedIn, there aren&#8217;t many bins. Crisler is out there connect with me, I&#8217;d love to connect with you. If you need help. Or if you have a question, I&#8217;m happy to answer them. Again, you know, this is going back to brand and you know, the same discussion we had with you all around. How do you how do you manage your brand and your reputation? what I&#8217;m passionate about is helping you all do cybersecurity better, whether it&#8217;s not whether or not my products involved at all, you know, I want to help you. And so if you have questions or comments or things that that you need information to I&#8217;m happy to point you to the right way. Fantastic. Thanks, Vince. Thank you. That was Vince Chrysler. CEO of dark, cubed and dark cubed. And I just want to just close with a couple of announcements that I have for you all. And I really appreciate you sticking around for the conversation and all that fun stuff. And so just a couple of quick things. Next week, we go back to our regularly scheduled content. And so I see that you there are some questions in the chat panel. We&#8217;re running out of time. So I apologize for those. I will I will certainly answer those questions, post recording. But there are two episodes coming out next week, one on Monday, and then another one I will be releasing, not going live. So just everybody is aware that I&#8217;m going live Monday as normally at 11am. eastern US time. And and then I will be putting out another episode because it was a lot of news that happened in October. And I wasn&#8217;t able to do that because you&#8217;re doing the National Cybersecurity Awareness Month content. Second is 11 five, there is a I&#8217;m doing a webinar called podcasting, podcasts marketing changes you need to know and so that&#8217;ll be on November 5. And so you can check that out by going to W three c i NC comm forward slash events. So w the number three c i NC comm forward slash events. And if you scroll down, you&#8217;ll see the Eventbrite embed, that will show up and you can go ahead and register for the webinar there. And then last but not least, if you&#8217;re not already a member of weapon beyond community, you can go ahead and join weapon beyond community that is our digital community for small business owners. And so you can go ahead to www make sure you put in the www www, web and beyond community, and you can join us there in the community. And so with that, we&#8217;ve come to the end of our time together this week. If you&#8217;ve enjoyed the live stream and you&#8217;re watching on YouTube, or wherever else feel free to hit the Like a thumbs up icon that helps us make new small business friends. And so thank you for doing that. If you have a question or a comment, you know that I&#8217;m always on Twitter, you can leave a comment or question you can tweet at us at W three, the number three w three consulting. And then you can join us of course here every Monday at 11am. Eastern, unless we otherwise note, thank you so much for spending this webinar beyond live with me with this cybersecurity theme and sticking with me all month on these topics. Again, I&#8217;m Ray Sidney-Smith, President of v3 Consulting and managing director of WCC web services, have a great week marketing. You know a great week ahead marketing on the web and beyond. Take care everybody  

https://youtu.be/E1q56iTRT9Q Keeping Business Owners and Staff Safe Online with Attorney and Cybersecurity Expert Michael Gips While today there’s a great deal of focus on what cyber-attacks can do to Small Business, there is equally as much business owners can do to protect themselves. Moreover, keeping your business, your personal and your employees’ safe online can also be good for business, too! To discuss good cybersecurity practices for Small Business, W3 Consulting’s Ray Sidney-Smith was joined by attorney and cybersecurity expert Michael Gips. Michael brings 12 years of experience advising Chief Security Officers (CSO) in his role as founder of the CSO Roundtable/CSO Center for Leadership &#38; Development. He helps businesses and organizations manage their online and offline security practices. They discussed how training, especially in our current state of on-again-off-again working remotely, and savvy business practices can alleviate the headaches of feeling vulnerable and insecure. As October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCAM), W3 Consulting has joined as a Champion on behalf of NCAM’s sponsors, National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and Cybersecurity &#38; Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), to bring timely information to Small Business about how to protect themselves technologically online and offline. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://webandbeyondcast.com/ for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. Each week, President of W3 Consulting and Managing Director of W3C Web Services (https://web.w3cinc.com/) Ray Sidney-Smith broadcasts live to update you on the latest small business digital marketing and business productivity technology updates you need to be effective.&#160; To see the prior weeks&#8217; videos, visit https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwbHNIcsaJ-jX25DQpjGkRkCqZZGmCYbQ. Come with your Small Business digital marketing and related questions! For future Web and Beyond Live streams, use https://w3cinc.com/webandbeyondlive to find the latest, upcoming event! Subscribe to W3 Consulting to get notified of new videos and livestreams: https://w.w3cinc.com/subscribe-youtube For more content from W3 Consulting, check out our podcast: https://webandbeyondcast.com Follow W3 Consulting on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/w3consulting&#160; Follow W3 Consulting on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/w3consulting Like W3 Consulting on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/w3consultinginc Follow W3 Consulting on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/w3consulting In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. GIPS Insights Business internet security products &#38; services &#124; Avast Business McAfee Total Protection 2020 &#124; Antivirus software Bitdefender Business and Enterprise CyberSecurity Solutions Norton 360 with LifeLock &#124; Cyber safety for PC, Mac, Android &#38; iOS Global Insights in Professional Security Podcast Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360b6f8b" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360b6f8b" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360b6f8b" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360b6f8b" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > asdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVc6FWjSWHI Cyber-Resilience for Small Business: An Overview of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework Listen/watch to learn the five parts of the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Cybersecurity Framework from President/CEO of W3 Consulting Ray Sidney-Smith. You’ll walk away with a good understanding of the cybersecurity framework and practices and tools you can use immediately to work safer on and off the Web. Now more than ever, Small Business is under attack. From the COVID-19 pandemic to global digitalization to hackers finding easy targets of Small Business owners, their families and their employees working at the store, office, or at home. As October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCAM), W3 Consulting has joined as a Champion on behalf of NCAM’s sponsors, National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and Cybersecurity &#38; Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), to bring timely information to Small Business about how to protect themselves technologically online and offline. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://webandbeyondcast.com/ for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. Each week, President of W3 Consulting and Managing Director of W3C Web Services (https://web.w3cinc.com/) Ray Sidney-Smith broadcasts live to update you on the latest small business digital marketing and business productivity technology updates you need to be effective.&#160; To see the prior weeks&#8217; videos, visit https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwbHNIcsaJ-jX25DQpjGkRkCqZZGmCYbQ. Come with your Small Business digital marketing and related questions! For future Web and Beyond Live streams, use https://w3cinc.com/webandbeyondlive to find the latest, upcoming event! Subscribe to W3 Consulting to get notified of new videos and livestreams: https://w.w3cinc.com/subscribe-youtube For more content from W3 Consulting, check out our podcast: https://webandbeyondcast.com Follow W3 Consulting on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/w3consulting&#160; Follow W3 Consulting on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/w3consulting Like W3 Consulting on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/w3consultinginc Follow W3 Consulting on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/w3consulting In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Small Business Cybersecurity Corner &#124; NIST&#160; Official pfSense Hardware, Appliances, and Security Gateways&#160; Results on google.com &#124; Spyse&#160; PortaPow – Data security and charging accessories&#160; Expert In-Depth Research of Safety &#38; Security Products &#8211; SafeHome.org&#160; CreditSignal&#160;(Dun &#38; Bradstreet Business Credit Reporting) “Small Business Cyber-Resilience: The Basics of Cybersecurity for Small Business” &#8211; Slides “Small Business Cyber-Resilience: The Basics of Cybersecurity for Small Business” &#8211; Slides and Recording Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360bb0fb" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360bb0fb" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360bb0fb" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360bb0fb" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:03Welcome, everybody to web and beyond live for this edition, which is for October 12 2020. I&#8217;m Ray Sidney-Smith, President of W three consulting and managing director of WCC web services. With that being the case, I&#8217;m going to be talking today about cybersecurity, because it is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. And what I wanted to do was to spend this and actually the next two weeks, with special guests, covering some things that you should be paying attention to related to cybersecurity. And what I wanted to do this week is to really start off with a discussion on the NIST cybersecurity framework. And what this is, is a framework for small business owners like yourself, to be able to really consider what are the real issues that you need to be doing throughout the course of your business to make sure that you&#8217;re able to understand, manage, and really, ultimately, express the risks, both internally and externally regarding your cybersecurity practices. And so what I wanted to do was to talk about this kind of in a different flavor than I think most people do, which is that most people talk about this from the perspective of being really a share, a share and shame kind of concept, which is to basically, you know, fear and shame you into utilizing these practices. And what I want you to be able to do, is to really focus on for me, the things that are practical and productive for you regarding your cybersecurity practices. So, for example, I think about this from a marketing strategy perspective, first and foremost, which is that if you are staying safe, you are projecting a message to your customers, that you care that you care about their safety, that is the safety of their data, safety of their own security and privacy. And that is something that people can&#8217;t really, they can&#8217;t buy, there&#8217;s, there&#8217;s really no value higher than protecting people&#8217;s data privacy and data security, especially when they&#8217;re transacting with you in the digital age. So I really find it to be important as just kind of a marketing edge to always say I think about your privacy first. So that you&#8217;re able to work with me and be safe and secure in that way to is just kind of a greater resilience perspective, which is that when a business is impacted, which is, you know, usually when people contact me, while I don&#8217;t handle cybersecurity for small businesses, my background and specialty and helping people in the digital space, people just contact me a lot about issues. And it&#8217;s always after the fact, when they have been impacted by a phishing attack that has led to some kind of malware infection or something else like that, that they then come to us and say, Gosh, we&#8217;ve been infiltrated. And what can we do now to protect ourselves in the future. And it&#8217;s usually it&#8217;s too late right now, they&#8217;ve lost productivity in that sense. And what I really would love to see people do is to have not lost that productivity, and to be on the on the kind of before side of that before, they&#8217;re impacted by all of this, so that they&#8217;re able to continue working without any impact on productivity. So you have lower downtime, greater productivity. And in many cases, you&#8217;ll have lower insurance premiums, and lower costs, generally, I mean, some of these larger, you know, security risks, security impacts and breaches and other ones that have happened, you know, you have like a ransomware attack, and the ransomware person&#8217;s asking for, you know, X number of hundreds or thousands of Bitcoin in order to be paid off, you know, with but at the same time, you have, on the flip side of that, even if they don&#8217;t pay the ransomware, they&#8217;re still still paying millions of dollars to be able to do the backup restores, and so on and so forth. So while your business may not, it may not cost your business, millions of dollars to restore data, it can still cost thousands, maybe 10s of thousands of dollars to restore data systems, even if you don&#8217;t pay for ransomware. So it ends up actually costing you money that you just don&#8217;t need to pay for that you shouldn&#8217;t have to if you do the right things. And and then next up is staff. And we know that unfortunately, it&#8217;s human error, and also internal human infiltration. That actually is the the highest numbers of problems when it comes to cybersecurity. And if we are cybersecurity focused as small business owners, we can both stop people from gaining access to systems that they shouldn&#8217;t have in the first place, which removes the risk there right and too, happy staff members, right staff members that are calm, given a sense of safety so that they can log in and pay attention to what they need to really gives them a sense of being able to work without fear. You know, so often now today people are always talking about how employees are the ones Who are the likeliest people I literally just said earlier, right? You know staff members are the likeliest, you know error in the systems. They allow in that first phishing attack by clicking on a link in an email, those kinds of things. If we can kill some of those things at the top of the of the chart, then what happens is we&#8217;re able to then create a greater experience for employees because they feel safe to be able to be innovative and creative and do the work they need to do in their environments without too much fear of cybersecurity impact. And then, of course, I always think about this from an innovation perspective, if we&#8217;re doing the right things in cybersecurity. In our businesses, we&#8217;re actually also doing really great things in terms of innovation and being flexible and adaptive in a dynamic environment. If 2020 hasn&#8217;t taught us anything else, it&#8217;s the fact that being in and around, you know, a situation that is constantly changing and uncertain. For so many of us, we have to be able to be that flexible and adaptive in the face of almost anything. And we have to kind of consider it as an ongoing natural disaster, you know, this whole COVID-19 pandemic, if we think about the cybersecurity risks as basically an ongoing thing, right, it&#8217;s an ongoing natural disaster. We&#8217;re capable of of watching it in slow motion and understanding how to respond to those things, but it actually will create new and good things on the other side of this. In one case, in point, I mean, something that I&#8217;ve been talking about quite often, in these past, you know, almost year now is explaining to people how their ability to create a take a physical retail environment and make a digital now gives them on the other side of this pandemic, a real rate, solid business, that will be future proofed to some extent, and it&#8217;s diversifying revenues, it&#8217;s creating multiple revenue streams, as opposed to just one and maybe creating new products, because, you know, delivering your services through the web, as opposed to just in a physical environment or over the phone and email is giving them a greater and potentially broader audience in order to serve. So these things are really, really powerful, we&#8217;re really on the, the, stop thinking about it from a fear based perspective, and then really start thinking about it from how can you make this a business advantage, and then cybersecurity becomes a much easier thing. So what I wanted to do was to cover how the NIST cybersecurity framework is structured, I don&#8217;t want to get too far into the details I want to cover by showing you some of the pieces here, so that you&#8217;re better able to understand how it&#8217;s put together, and so on and so forth. But I do want to cover some of the background details. So it&#8217;s a little bit more useful to you, in, in essence. So what I&#8217;m gonna show you first here is this is actually the slide deck from mist themselves. NIST is the National Institute for Standards and Technology. And they are a government agency that provides these really great resources for small businesses, they actually have a section on their website dedicated to small business cybersecurity, and I&#8217;ll actually show the show that to you at the end. So you can find out more resources on it. But in essence, this all started in terms of the the framework itself started in 2013, when an executive order was was issued 613 636, which in essence, culminated in the cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2014. Then again, in 2017, under President Obama, I&#8217;m sorry, under President Trump, we had executive order 13 800. And that actually ended up strengthening some of the pieces of the framework and actually added another component here to it. And we&#8217;re not going to talk about that today, because it&#8217;s really not necessary. But you know, there basically has been this history over the past 10 or so years of helping to put together the framework so that what we&#8217;re about to talk about, could come to pass. So we had, we not only had the framework come together itself, I&#8217;m now trying to find my screen here seems to be missing. Let&#8217;s go ahead and move this over here. My apologies, I don&#8217;t know why this is, there we go. So we have the the framework itself, which is, is basically the five parts that are on screen right now. And if we can think about it from the perspective that the five parts which are to identify, protect, detect, respond and recover, those five are what we call functions. Those functions are those five pieces, the ID, PR, and so on, so forth. So identification, protection, detection, response, and recovery. And so what what those are, are basically the groupings under which outcomes for your business are looked at. So whenever you&#8217;re thinking about your business, the framework is supposed to allow you to have this common languages they talk about so that you&#8217;re able to describe what the outcomes you want from any part of the framework. So when you&#8217;re dealing with a cybersecurity risk, how do you want to describe the outcome That&#8217;s really where categories come into play and sub categories. So categories are really outcomes that are more broad, you know, broad in sort of scope. So we might talk about identity identity management. And we&#8217;ll talk a little bit about identity management shortly. So we can talk about identity management. And that&#8217;s a broad category, right? So that&#8217;s a category within the sub category, we might then talk about access level management and how we&#8217;re going to do user account management within a particular business. That&#8217;s going to be our sub category. And how we define sub categories within the system are those specific outcomes, we&#8217;re going to set user account levels to the least privileged user level whenever anybody else it whenever we create new user accounts, right. So the administrative assistant doesn&#8217;t need access to the financial systems that the accountant needs, all they need is the least privileged user account access in order to be able to do what they need in the world that they&#8217;re working on, then we come to the final stage of the kind of strategy. And so we go from the perspective of the outcomes, specific outcomes, categories and subcategories. And then we get to this final section, which is basically the informative references. And the framework basically has these four levels, right function category, which is, you know, high level outcome, subcategory specific outcomes. And then finally, informative, informative references. Those are basically resources, they may be standards, they may be guidelines, they may be practices that you want to implement in the business to be able to make sure that you&#8217;re adhering to those pieces. So in essence, that is the the the framework in a nutshell, right, it covers these, these broad areas and pieces so that you&#8217;re able basically able to understand what&#8217;s going on in those spaces. What I wanted to do was I wanted to cover the five different functions, and what I tend to guide businesses on doing in those five functions to be able to stay cyber resilience. And so there&#8217;s this term we call cyber resilience. And cyber resilience is the functions for being able to follow those five functions right in and staying on top of all of the various areas within the business. So I wanted to cover each of these and talk about some of the pieces that you can use to stay cyber resilient throughout the process. And of course, that takes us first to the idea of identification or ident. Identifying. And identifying really comes down to the idea of identifying all of the areas in which you need to pay attention to when it comes to your own cybersecurity footprint, I actually usually start people out in this particular area, which is that most businesses don&#8217;t know this, but you have a, you have a footprint, you have a business credit profile, and so your financial world, and really everything you do as a business, legitimately on on, you know, with financial institutions, with other businesses, and so on so forth, are actually tracked using something called your DMV number, your Dun and Bradstreet number, it&#8217;s a credit file just like you would in your personal finances, you know, you have the three major credit reporting bureaus, and so on, so forth. So I usually start with businesses when we talk about identifying and the system Unknown Speaker 13:17is just to Raymond Sidney-Smith 13:18take it down to a very practical level, right? If we just jump from categories, and subcategories and so on, so forth to one of the informative references, really just a generalized practice is to go ahead and make sure that you&#8217;re, you have a dnb number, that you&#8217;re tracking your credit profile, and making sure that there aren&#8217;t other bad actors who haven&#8217;t already gotten in and gotten access to your data, and gotten access to your financial records and have used them in appropriately. This is a good first step, I would also recommend that you go ahead and do this, with the three major reporting agencies, the personal credit reporting agencies, you are allowed a free credit report, according to federal law once a year from them, it&#8217;s not going to give you a credit score, but it&#8217;s going to give you the report itself. And you can go ahead and submit for that you can gain access to the credit report, and you can actually make sure that, you know, something bad hasn&#8217;t already happened. Many times, I I&#8217;ve talked to clients, and they don&#8217;t realize until after the fact that something has happened. And once they&#8217;ve done the research, they find Oh, you know, what, we&#8217;ve been having this problem for quite some time, didn&#8217;t realize it, but now we recognize that somebody has been utilizing our name, usually in by mistake, it&#8217;s usually not that they were willfully doing it. And so therefore, you know, going ahead and, and not knowing why certain things were happening in the business that were, you know, getting mail that wasn&#8217;t theirs or other kinds of things of that nature. So I see a message from Karen, she&#8217;s saying that I see a question. I&#8217;m not quite sure I understand the question Karen. So if you want to restate the question, I am seeing your questions. So if you have any questions, feel free to throw them in the chat. But I&#8217;ll answer those when I get to the end. So just make sure that you go ahead and structure your kind of first step of identity identifying is to make sure you know what your credit profiles look like what your business profiles look like. And, and that way you&#8217;re kind of staying on point in terms of keeping information fresh for yourself. The next area I always tell people to do is to really look at the, the core infrastructure that you have around the business. So for example, this website, for example, has safe home.org. And while a lot of business owners, maybe, oh, not to worry at all, Karen, I just I, that&#8217;s fine. I&#8217;ll respond to these things once once I get to the end. But feel free to ask your questions in the chat. And I&#8217;ll try to answer your questions when we do get to the end. So So when when we&#8217;re on talking about the the notion of physical safety with regard to the business, there are physical access issues that we always have to think about. And many times, we actually don&#8217;t know what kind of security we have in place. So just think about the places that you can go to to get that data. So I think about your home security systems, if you have a home based business, or if you&#8217;re working from home, if any of your staff members or employees are working from home, you should also be considering what kinds of safety precaution precautions physical safety precautions are being taken about the digital security of your business. If you&#8217;re you know, employees or you have a general, you know, practice of leaving your phone out on your kitchen table next to your front door. That&#8217;s a problem, right? Because anyone can just walk through your front door, grab a phone and run with it. And guess what, that&#8217;s a that&#8217;s a risk. Now, not saying you have to change anything, but you should know that that is a risk, right. And that&#8217;s where things like safe home.org, you can go through look at their resources to see what kinds of home security systems what kind of smart home security systems are available to both increase your security across the board. Okay. I also recommend whenever you&#8217;re doing this kind of work, if you are in a commercial environment, I would suggest that you actually go to your commercial building manager and talk to them about what kinds of security protocols they have in place, you might have things like a sauna troll at your castle system, one of those types of commercial base systems in your office in the building, you may not know what kinds of security protocols that they&#8217;re using, as a relates to it, you might just use your key farm to get into the elevator or the building or the office who has access to those, how do they log who has access to those? And do you have access to those logs on a regular basis so that you can see, well wait a second, you know, I have the staff member who comes to the office from nine to five, but for some reason they&#8217;ve been coming in from, you know, 11pm to 3am, every day, that might show you that someone&#8217;s maybe stealing from you, you know, to taking data, it might also mean that your staff member is just working late hours, they&#8217;re a night owl, and they get stuff done late in the hours. But it actually helps you to understand what kind of risk you have out there. Right? This is about understanding risk and identifying what data you have available to you. This is also a really great time to identify all equipment, all software, and all data that is being collected by the business. So equipment and software is what are the various software that you are using, and on what equipment that could be computers, tablets, laptops, computers, servers, as well as in web services. Many times businesses have dozens and dozens of different kinds of web based services that they&#8217;re using, and web connected devices that they are transmitting data about. And you need to make sure that you know what data it is, I like to just create a simple Google Sheets workbook and putting all of that data into the Google Sheets workbook. So we know Okay, this is all the equipment in the business. This is the inventory of that this is good for accounting purposes anyway, because right we&#8217;re depreciating our assets over time anyway, and talking to our accountants about that. So we got that, we then put our all of our software and make a list of all the business software. And this really helps us have some of those hard decisions about, okay, we have three different pieces of software, at least in my world, I have three different software pieces of software that can do everything. Which ones do we really need. And do we need to create an attack surface that is the number and breath and volume of places where cyber criminal can attack us. So we call it an attack surface. We can reduce that by having one software that does everything we need it to do and not have three pieces of software that do the same function. So if you have a lot of overlapping functionality, we&#8217;d get rid of one of two of those. And guess what, we&#8217;re now saving money and we are reducing our cyber risk. So that can be really great. Just doing identification. I can help us do that, then we want to make sure data data is in all kinds of mealy little places, right? We can have data on our local machines, on our desktops, on our phones, on our tablets, on our laptops, and so on and so forth. But we also have lots of data in the cloud. And this could include OneDrive, and Dropbox, and many other file sharing tools, it could be our own websites, and making sure that our websites are secure, so that we&#8217;re not just placing data nakedly up in the cloud. They&#8217;re just making sure that we&#8217;re we&#8217;re putting our data, we know where it is, and whether or not it has the appropriate safety and access protocols to make sure those are safe. So that&#8217;s part of the framework. That&#8217;s all under NIST identifying functions, making sure all those pieces are together, very easy to do. One other thing that I really like using is the concept of a, this this tool called spies. So spies is a cybersecurity search engine. And in essence, what you can do is you can actually go to spy se.com. And I&#8217;ll put links to all of these in the in the notes below, and in the description below later. But in essence, what you can do here is you can go ahead and type in a domain, I&#8217;ll type in google.com, just for the fun of it. But if you type in google.com, you will then see all of this information about the google.com browser. So you would type your own website address in there, and any other website addresses. So your if your email address domain is different than your business domain, if you have multiple services, for example, you know, I run a digital community, I&#8217;ll talk about that, at the end, I run a digital community, I want to be able to know what&#8217;s happening with those digital communities and all of the various sub domains associated with it. And you can see here, it looks at DNS, and you need to need to know what these things are in order to be able to benefit from seeing this. But you can see all of the various data that is embedded in here and seeing what is happening with your data. And really sometimes what is happening with your clients data, because it&#8217;s databases that&#8217;s holding client data. Usually, that is that is happening on the internet, it shows you related organizations. So here goes Google, you can see all the various other related organizations to it, all of the underlying certificate security certificates related to it, all kinds of fun things, you can see the email addresses for the organization that are exposed to the web, and what that means for your business. I&#8217;m just really, really interesting information that you can capture and utilize just to, you know, get a better idea about what you have exposed there on the internet. And then, of course, this leads us to I&#8217;m sorry, I thought I was actually sharing this on screen. But you can see here, this is what I was talking about on screen now, which is the the spies search engine and seeing all the various data that you can look at and track about the the domain and domains of your business. Okay, last but not least, is then creating some level of policy around the organization. And I find this to be one of the most daunting practices, which is going out and really identifying what are the policies that we that we need in order to be effective in the business, I think, you know, having a digital device policy is going to be really important. And making sure that you go out there and making sure that you have some higher level policies like an SPF policy on your email, which is basically a type of technology you know that you&#8217;re you&#8217;re implementing some code up there in the cloud, that basically protects the identity of your email going outbound, and inbound for your email on transit, you can make sure that you have either DK DKM, or demark, which are other types of email based authentication. You can have some digital device policies, as I said earlier, making sure that you&#8217;re telling your employees which devices they can bring to and from the office and connect to services, making sure your website has TLS encryption, basically, that little lock icon on your website is really important. And making sure that your payment services are PCI DSS compliant. So this is one of those cases where it sounds more complicated than it really is. But you know, if you&#8217;re using a, you know, a reputable point of sale system, then you&#8217;re likely going to have a fairly secure connection to the payment systems that are collecting and transiting your, your clients data information on the web, and other places. You just want to make sure you have all of those various policies kind of outlined, and figure out what policies you need. You know, you don&#8217;t need every policy, especially if you&#8217;re a solo practicing attorney, you may not need all the policies that say small retail shop may need or if you&#8217;re doing multinational services or multinational product based business, you&#8217;re going to need some other policies as well. do recommend that everybody have a terms of service as well as a privacy policy on their website, it&#8217;s just good protection for you and making sure that you have, you&#8217;re using a good template from which to create those, I think termsfeed dotnet has a great one, as a policy generator for those kinds of things, and so on, so forth, but just making a decision in that identify stage of what policies the business needs in the cybersecurity space. Okay, let&#8217;s move on to protect protect is really a is really the the core functions of what most people know when they think about cybersecurity. And it is the space where we spend the most time. But the reality is, is that all five parts of the framework from identify, protect, all the way through the recover stage is all going to be important for us to be able to understand what the, the full protection of the organization can look like. That being the case, when we talk about protection, there are a couple things, there are a few things that I like to talk about. And I&#8217;m just going to cover them very quickly, together. First and foremost, is an electronic data policy regarding disposal, or at least the sanitization of that kind of data, you can easily go to Google as I just did. And you can do a search, I typed in electronic data disposal policy template. And there are just pages and pages 100 8 million results rendered. But you can go through here and find lots and lots of examples of a of a data policy. And this is really the first step right, like what data are you going to have? Which data? What data are you going to keep for some period of time and then delete? And what data are you going to immediately delete upon receipt and review analysis and synthesis, right, we need to make some hard calls as it relates to what data you need to of course, you&#8217;re going to have to keep data that that complies with various laws, maybe their financial or tax laws that you have to apply by, or other kinds of state laws, according to your industry that you have to keep for some period of time, then you need to get rid of that data, or keep it for some period of time, and then keeping it for some period of time and then deleting it and having your staff aware of what that process looks like how long are you going to keep email? How long? Are you going to keep documentation? How long are you going to keep other kinds of, of reference files, internal and external reference files. This is all important, not just from a cybersecurity perspective, I would also push that it&#8217;s probably a good position for ediscovery or electronic discovery. If you&#8217;re sued, and you have data that is, you know, since the beginning of the business, guess what, you know, the law firm on the other side, the lawyer on the other side, that law firm trying to litigate the situation, they&#8217;re gonna want that data, they&#8217;re gonna go ahead and ask the judge for all the data they can possibly get. Now, of course, you can fight back against that and say, what&#8217;s the, you know, how is that pertinent to the case involved, and make some site make some argument to that effect. But just know that what&#8217;s good for data sanitization and data disposal is also good for discovery, it turns out as well. Okay, next up, I want to kind of take us along to the idea of then, from a protection perspective, what can we do that we call what we call at the edge at the edge means wherever we&#8217;re connected to the internet, that outermost point where data is basically got its first point connected to the outside world, that is usually met by a router or hub or some other kind of data piece. When you&#8217;re connected from your tablet, your laptop, your computer, you&#8217;re connecting through a router, or some other device that connects up to your internet service provider, and out there to the world. What most of those have, and some of them don&#8217;t, now that many of us are working from home, or some hybrid of home and at the office, many of them have a firewall. And those firewalls are sometimes Unknown Speaker 28:57good, Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:58they&#8217;re sometimes not so good. And so I tend to actually recommend people to have stronger firewall tools. And one of those firewall tools is called firewalla. And firewalla is a tool that allows you to be able to plug you just basically plug this device into I&#8217;m going to bring it up on screen here. You just plug it into your network, and it acts as kind of a sentinel, it kind of monitors your network, and it gives you a whole bunch of power. Now they run in different versions. So you can see here they have like the baseline which is the blue, they have a red gold, and then they have this much more next generation one which is this multi gigabit version as well. But in essence, you can put these small devices onto networks and they provide you with all kinds of optimized security functionality. So they can not only protect you against hackers on your network, this can include it like if you have any key employees or If you have employees who are working from home, you know, they&#8217;re on home networks with home, you know, routers, those are not designed to protect a business, certainly not designed to protect customer data. And so something as simple as a firewall, a plugged into the into the home network can really seal a lot of the cybersecurity, you know, holes, and really protect the system. In addition, it gives you a whole bunch of other features, I mean, privacy protection with a VPN. So even if you&#8217;re you take your laptop, or I take my iPad, here, I have all my notes on my iPad here, I take this iPad out to cafe, with the VPN on it, I&#8217;ve basically created a secure tunnel, so that the public Wi Fi isn&#8217;t picking up all of my interaction and data. While I&#8217;m out there in in the wild. In essence, you can block ads through firewalls. So just a really, really powerful tool. Now, can contrast that with pf sense, pf sense is actually an open source piece of software. So if you&#8217;re of the geeky, or, you know, side, like I am little nerdy, and you like technology, you can install pf sense, you know, directly on a Raspberry Pi or any other, you know, appliance that can run the software, if you&#8217;re not as geeky, you could just basically buy one of these appliances, and they come in all kinds of varieties and solutions. And so here you can see that they have various levels of from a really tiny, small office in version, all the way up to much, much larger business versions that can basically run a lot of data over the system. But in essence they are. They&#8217;re they&#8217;re basically, as they say, it&#8217;s a firewall, it&#8217;s kind of like a gatekeeper. And it&#8217;s a security guard who sits there and says, okay, you&#8217;re allowed in and you&#8217;re allowed to interact with the network, no, you&#8217;re not allowed to interact with the network. And anything that&#8217;s happening inside of the network is protected from the outside world. So the outside world sees nothing, because pf sense basically puts up this gate. And so what&#8217;s happening inside the network stays in the network, it&#8217;s kind of like what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas, right. And so pf sense can actually be a very, very powerful tool for being able to protect against these kinds of cyber threats, by in essence, creating a firewall and giving you controls, you can like login to the PF sense and say, Hey, I don&#8217;t want any of these things to be, you know, bothering my system. And, and getting in the way, a couple of other notes here. Under protect, it&#8217;s really, really important for you to be able to have and update your computers and devices. So if your, if your computer or device has a functional a digital function, that is it&#8217;s powered by a battery, it likely needs to be updated, if it&#8217;s communicating and, and and transmitting data on behalf of the business. If there isn&#8217;t a function for being able to update it, I usually recommend that you check it I mean, you need to find a tool that can do the same thing where you know that it is getting regular updates, both security and feature updates. But for me, mostly, it&#8217;s security, if it&#8217;s already doing what you need it to do, let it keep on doing it, but it needs to be able to get security updates. If the tool is not sufficiently sending regular security updates, then, in essence, they&#8217;re not doing the right job that you need to stay protected today. So when those kinds of things happen, you need to make sure that you&#8217;re getting rid of those devices that are not keeping update up to date and not getting you and keeping you protected. So if you&#8217;re using Windows or Mac OS, Android, or iOS, or iPad OS, all of them provide regular updates. And while it can be a little bit frustrating, I know very well that that reality, because features change, and so on and so forth, you must at least turn on either automated updates so that you&#8217;re getting the regular security updates. I don&#8217;t care about the feature updates, I care about the security updates, make sure the updates are secure. And go ahead and keep yourself buttoned up in that sense. The reason for that is that the more updates security updates you get the lower you have a risk of something that some cyber cyber criminal found out about right, you know, we have cybersecurity researchers, white hack researchers who are out there studying devices and learning about cyber risks on these various devices. They go, Oh, look, there&#8217;s a there&#8217;s a Apple, you know, threat that that can be exploited. They let Apple know, Apple builds a fix for their system. They push it out to their users. And now it&#8217;s up to the user usually, to say yes, I want to update this particular version so that I get the latest security updates. When you get those security updates, you now have blocked out that cybercriminal who is now looking for devices at a particular version to go ahead and infiltrate their systems. So if you You can go ahead and get yourself protected, then you&#8217;re removing yourself from that class of victims. That that, you know malware criminal is out there, infecting other computers with. So just staying up to date in regarding those security patches, you can usually turn those on in a in a, you know, automated fashion, you&#8217;re usually pretty good to go. Now, there&#8217;s something that I think I&#8217;m probably in the minority about. But when we talk about the NIST cybersecurity framework, one thing they talk about is installing software that is going to protect you basically is going to monitor your system. For these kinds of things. I&#8217;m actually quite against it. On the Windows system, we have Windows Defender, which is Microsoft, Microsoft&#8217;s and built in Windows malware protection tool, it is purely sufficient for what you&#8217;re going to need on the Mac OS system, you can potentially install other kinds of malware protection tools, like you know, some kind of antivirus and other kinds of things, they tend to actually be more buggy and more viruses than actually not having anything, if you just stay up to date, you&#8217;re likely going to protect yourself more if you&#8217;re not visiting, you know, websites that are known for for infecting you with malware, you&#8217;re going to be better off, not having anything and just keeping it up to date, then installing something that&#8217;s going to create one more cost to the business and to potentially a greater attack surface. Because you better believe that those cyber criminals are out there looking for exploits in the software that you have installed for antivirus and anti spyware and otherwise, right, they&#8217;re trying to attack those tools, as much as they are trying to attack the operating system as well. So no reason to really get yourself bent out of shape in that regard. If you&#8217;re currently using an antivirus software, that&#8217;s fine, continue using it if it&#8217;s if it&#8217;s updated regularly, and it works for you. My personal opinion is that we no longer need those because we have Microsoft Windows Defender doing the job. And as long as the security updates are being done and applied to all of our systems, right Android, iOS, iPad, OS, Mac OS and Windows, as long as those are being updated with their security updates. That&#8217;s the most invest we should be doing in those capacities. Next is backups. I&#8217;ve actually done a three part series on a colleague&#8217;s podcasts, and I&#8217;ll put links to these in the video notes. But you shouldn&#8217;t have effective backups for your systems. Full stop. Next up is encryption. encryption is this very complicated world, right? When we talk about algorithms and computers, technology and whatnot. In essence, what we want to really think about is encryption is a shield to the data so that other people don&#8217;t have access to that data. In multiple types of environments, those multiple types of environments are in use at rest, and in transit. Now, most of the time, if it&#8217;s in use, it&#8217;s usually unencrypted because it&#8217;s locally on our system or on the server being utilized. And therefore it&#8217;s protected by our firewalls. When it&#8217;s in transit, definitely, we want that encrypted, right? If there&#8217;s any messages or security information, or private information that&#8217;s being transmitted across the internet, insecure, unencrypted, that&#8217;s basically sharing it with the rest of the world, it is the World Wide Web, right? Then we have the idea of at rest. So when we take data down onto our systems are pushing data up to the cloud server, basically, a web based server, the web based server should be encrypting that data because it&#8217;s outside of our firewall. And we don&#8217;t want the people who have our data in the cloud, to just have ready access to the data of our clients and customers. Okay, so we want to make sure that we have those encryptions. So that&#8217;s the part of protect, and there&#8217;s nothing more that I can really say about that other than talk to the providers, you know, talk to your to the folks who are who are providing you with software and say, Hey, is this encrypted at rest is encrypted in transit? What kind of encryption are you using? And how can I be assured that you&#8217;re doing the right things in those capacities? And then, so Karen, you have a couple questions. And I&#8217;ll stop here, because I&#8217;m going to go to detect. And so and see if these questions were related to the protect section on you&#8217;re asking, how does a company know they are being sent a validated update, as opposed to someone trying to get into your system pretending there they are your software company? And then your second question, I think it was the same question. Okay. So, great question. What I would usually do is, if you go to the website of the software provider, they will post their what they call release notes, sometimes they&#8217;ll put out a blog post, sometimes they&#8217;ll tweet about it. In essence, you want to, you want to see that the software provider themselves has notified their customers in some way, shape, or form that could be via email newsletter, as well. And in those release notes, it should say, we&#8217;re updating with version you know, and they&#8217;ll give the numbered version and date and time in which they&#8217;ve released that version. If it matches up with the date and time that you&#8217;ve Receive the notification in your software, you have greater assurance that that software update is from that particular vendor. If you have any questions, most of the time these things are what are what are called signed, they have a security key associated with them, you can actually email the software provider and say, Hey, can you send me the keys so that I can verify in the software that this is the actual and appropriate update from you and not from some near dwell? Okay, so you can do those kinds of things. If you haven&#8217;t set up with, like I said, if it&#8217;s a Microsoft, if it&#8217;s Android, if it&#8217;s iOS, iPad, iOS from Apple, or if it&#8217;s from Mac OS from Apple, you, if you turn those things on automatically, they do a lot of work in the back end to make sure that those are validated. It&#8217;s any software providers outside of the operating systems that you would want to do that kind of assurance work with. So good question. Okay, next up is detect, right, so we&#8217;ve gone from identify, to protect, then we go to detect, and then we&#8217;ll talk about response and recovery. So in the detection world, we talk about intrusion detection systems and intrusion prevention systems. And these are in the end, kind of the, the enterprise level, when we talk about these things, in terms of business, you really should just think about the concept of detection as being you being vigilant. training your staff on how phishing doxxing whaling happens. So, phishing attacks and spear phishing attacks, and whaling is really just the idea of getting information so that you can then get someone to click on a link, give you more information. doxxing is the idea of collecting information. It&#8217;s all social engineering attacks. So if I call your business and say, Hey, by the way, Unknown Speaker 41:43I&#8217;m your plumber. Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:44And, you know, when I got a notice that your plumbing system was having some problems, and I got to come over and look at them. What&#8217;s your, what&#8217;s your water account number so that I can get that water account number? And you say, Oh, yeah, well, it&#8217;s the plumber, I might as well give him the number, and so on, and so forth, and plumber, you know, you give the plumber the number of your water account, and the plumber calls back and says, thank you so much for giving me the water account, you know, what I call the water company, and they wouldn&#8217;t let me talk to you. So I need the same password on your account in order to talk to them. I&#8217;m so sorry. They&#8217;re giving me a problem, blah, blah, blah. And so you say, Oh, well, no problem, here goes our passcode account. And guess what, what they&#8217;ve done now is they&#8217;ve gotten you comfortable giving them some information. And it turns out, it wasn&#8217;t the plumber, some cybercriminal, who&#8217;s been basically using you to get data out of out of you, so that they can then call your bank and say, oh, by the way, I and I talked to the customer. And you know, and they gave me this passcode. And I go, Oh, I&#8217;m sorry, that&#8217;s not really the passcode. But it&#8217;s close. Because you know, maybe you use the same passcode for your water account as you do for your for your bank account, you know, passcode, it doesn&#8217;t matter. The point is, is that they&#8217;re collecting little bits of data across the board. So they can be able to go out and create a profile of you, right, they&#8217;re trying to understand you, it&#8217;s just like, when burglars, quote unquote, case a joint, they&#8217;re basically casing you as a business. And the more data they have, the more they&#8217;re likely to be able to go ahead and call a bank, call a financial institution, or other service providers, and then get into your systems at way. So they&#8217;re trying to use these these these social ways of being able to get data and then using it against you. So you need to train your staff in that detection space, which is all human, right. It&#8217;s all human on practices to make sure that you&#8217;re staying safe. But what we can do in terms of technology to make us more safe is one of things like firewall and pf sense and other kinds of, you know, systems in place because not only do they block things from accessing, they&#8217;re also doing some level of intrusion detection and intrusion prevention, because they have notification systems. So your router or your hub or whatever you&#8217;re using to be able to route data from the internet on the outside and inside, if you have proper router and firewall notification rules set up, when, for example, someone connects to the to a system that they shouldn&#8217;t, your router can shoot you a message can shoot you a notification in a mobile application or send you an email. I like mobile notifications better because they&#8217;re a little bit more secure from within the app, right? And a little less susceptible to to finagling and and so those notifications will tell you, hey, by the way, you have this lockdown server. And for some reason someone has been trying to log into the lockdown server, right? your firewall can tell you that and you can then say, Well, why is somebody trying to touch that that address? Why is somebody looking at that? That&#8217;s not for you to be like, Ah, I&#8217;m gonna go off for the weekend and not care. That&#8217;s a moment to step in and really figure out what&#8217;s going on. Was that just a staff member mistakenly doing something? Or is that some kind of cyber criminal trying to do something wrong in the system? We need to be village vigilant in those circumstances. And going back to Karen&#8217;s question earlier, she clarified that it was McAfee, if you, I would absolutely reach out to McAfee, if you&#8217;re paying for the McAfee software, then McAfee has an obligation to tell you whether or not that software is updated. Now, if they are downloading signatures, which is basically their little security updates, if they&#8217;re downloading those signatures automatically, then you don&#8217;t need to worry about it, because they&#8217;re encrypting those those data streams, and then they should be updating the signatures in the background for you. But if for some reason, you got a notification that says you need to interact with the system, in order to be able to update it, I would contact McAfee through support and have them verify their their key to basically tell you, Hey, this is the this is this is a true and accurate signature update that we&#8217;re doing. Okay. So just make sure that you do if you are working with a within an antivirus vendor of any kind make sure that they have some legitimising way to confirm that the data that they&#8217;re sending you is correct. Further down the detection route, right, we have the Leaning on of your software providers, this is one of those cases where Microsoft 365 G Suite, Google&#8217;s Productivity Suite, which is now transitioning into Google workspace, you need to you need to depend upon them with SAML, which is a markup language that allows for Security Assertion, then there is single sign on. And so these providers give you the ability to use them to log into systems so that you&#8217;re securing access and monitoring access through them. And therefore you can be notified when someone is not able to log in effectively, knowing that, hey, why am I getting a bunch of logins from Ethiopia, when my business is in, you know, Peoria, right? Like, the dust doesn&#8217;t make any sense that someone&#8217;s trying to login from this foreign country, when you&#8217;re here in the States. So those are the kinds of notifications that your software vendors can then your infrastructure vendors can then send to you. I do this myself, you know, we are a G Suite house. And so we were transitioning over to Google workspace ourselves. And we also I personally use Google and my own product, my own personal life. I&#8217;m the Google Small Business advisor for productivity. So you can imagine highlight Google products, both personally and professionally, it turns out, and so I have multi factor authentication turned on, on all of my all of all of my Google accounts. And I actually have a security key a physical security key for both accounts as well. So multi factor authentication says, Google is looking for where I am located, it&#8217;s looking at my username and password, which just think of it as a public key and private key, those have to be correct. Where I&#8217;m logging in needs to be someplace I&#8217;ve logged in before, and make sense that I find logging into the location that other devices are connected, maybe in the same location or in the same vicinity. And it then has me plug this little device in and press the button or using Bluetooth, you know, clicking the button on the Bluetooth fumble off dongle. And then it says, Oh, yeah, this is actually Ray. And he&#8217;s trying to log into the account. Now if I don&#8217;t do that, or you know, and all of my staff have the same security protocols if we don&#8217;t do that, and it&#8217;s for any service that we&#8217;re logging in through Google for. And that goes beyond Google, right. So if I&#8217;m trying to log into HubSpot, or if I&#8217;m trying to log into any other third party service that gives us Google Sites Single Sign On, they will not let us in, unless we do that right protocol for multi factor authentication. So and if if there is a failure to log in, it notifies me right. So it can tell me Hey, by the way, we just saw a potential person trying to log into this place, or someone put in your actual username and password like they got through the first stage, but they couldn&#8217;t authenticate beyond that, you probably want to go ahead and change your password, because someone has gotten access to it. That&#8217;s happened to me, but because I have my multifactor authentication, who cares? You know, like, I&#8217;ve not been infiltrated at all. It&#8217;s just done that, that detection and prevention for me in terms of protecting me from the logins that are erroneous, okay, so we want to pay attention to those things. All right. Finally, our response and recovery and these kind of blend together, but they&#8217;re distinct features here. One is the concept of understanding from a response perspective, you have a responsibility under state law, usually, to to deal with a couple of things data, data security, and data privacy, right. So just protecting data, protecting data security, and protecting data privacy. And these responsibilities, kind of run the gamut, based on where you might be in your particular area. So for example, I&#8217;m bringing this up on screen, but the National Conference of state legislators, they have a whole list of every state and their security breach notification laws. So what they say is, is that if you have data that is breached in your particular area. So, God forbid, but you you know, you do all the identifying you do all the protecting, you do all the detecting, but you still get breached, right, something gets through, you have an obligation in all 50 states in our union, at least in the United States to report that something has happened, okay. And this is related to personal information of your customers, that could be social security number, driver&#8217;s license number, any kinds of identifying information about them, and telling them what has actually been, you know, infiltrated what what data has been exfiltrated in essence, from the system. So you have to be really mindful of this, of this in the sense that you have an obligation to tell the authorities what actually has happened and what you have done to mitigate that both now and in the future. So, we have we have this, you know, obligation to tell people when this happens. On top of that, in particular industries, and for different reasons, you might have greater requirements. So we have HIPAA, which is the Health Information Privacy and Accountability Act, we have the wood capo, which is children&#8217;s privacy and Protection Act FERPA, which is related mostly to student records. So if you happen to be in the education space, we have sipo, which is the children&#8217;s internet Protection Act. So you know, filtering child records from harmful or what they consider obscene content on the internet. We have the gramm Leach bliley Act, which basically created greater responsibility to financial institutions like banks and otherwise, and what kinds of data protection and privacy protections they need to place on you. So if you&#8217;re in that space, you might, you know, be might have to, you know, comply with the glba. And then, most recently, we&#8217;ve had four or five, maybe six states apply their own laws that are akin to what what we know as GDPR, or the general data protection regulation, which is an EU law, it&#8217;s extra Chester extraterritorial, in essence, because it extends to any EU citizen wherever they may be. So we&#8217;re not just talking about people who are in the EU and the EU states, or one of the covered, you know, locales of the EU. But it&#8217;s for the EU citizens, wherever they may be in the world. So if you have someone who is a German citizen, in Virginia, Alexandria, Virginia, right now, they are, they are protected by the EU general data protection regulation. And that means your business, if they were to reach out to you, you would need to comply with those. Lest you want to be fined up to the 20 million euros that can be fined against you under the GDPR. It&#8217;s insane. But it really is a reality. Now, most businesses are not going to be culpable to that. And most businesses are not going to really worry about it too much. But I do recommend that you start to think what that all looks like I did a whole episode on GDPR on the podcast, and I&#8217;ll put a link to that in the video description and in the show notes as well. So you can check that out. But those laws are now being married, or kind of being matched to in state laws. So the defining one right now, I mean, New York and other states have ones that are kind of copycat laws of the California consumer Privacy Act. Most businesses are not actually required to comply with this, because you have to have so many, you know, customers in California, so many, so much business being transacted within within California, so many employees in order to have to comply, but be mindful of the fact that this is coming. This is a forthcoming reality to to the situation. So we have these laws. And that really leaves us with a necessity to have some level of response plan. How are we going to do data breach notifications? How are we collecting client information outside of our normative systems, so that we&#8217;re able to in a pinch, send a communique? Is that calling them? Is it emailing them? Is it sending them letters? What are the requirements under your state long or do that? Then of course, I&#8217;m having some kind of business continuity plan just like you have a disaster disaster recovery plan. You have a disaster recovery plan, right? You should add this cybersecurity response plan to your disaster recovery plan just like how you would respond to a natural disaster how you would now we have to plan for pandemics? How do you plan to be resilient among in a in a public health crisis? These are things we should add into those business continuity plans to make sure recovering for cybersecurity incidents. How are you going to keep the business running while still notifying authorities and keeping your customers and vendors up to date as you&#8217;re dealing with the recovery process? So then we go into the recovery process and of course That requires us to go in and say, Okay, what data? Do we have backed up? What infrastructure Do we have running? What was shut down during the cybersecurity incident? How do we get ourselves back up and running. And then again, rinse and repeat in terms of communicating those things, with customers, with your vendors, with your employees to make sure that they&#8217;re all up to speed. We also want to do in that response and recovery phase, a debriefing? What did we learn from the cybersecurity incident, which will help us go ahead and be able to deal with it in the future really respond in the future, in terms of identification, protection and detection, right, we want to go through those first stages, because we don&#8217;t want to deal with the latter two stages, right, we don&#8217;t want to be in a response and recovery stage all the time, we really want to identify, protect and detect as quickly as possible to be able to mitigate those risks. So that is the the NIST cybersecurity framework in a nutshell, there are a couple of other things that you can I just wanted to mention very, very briefly, every business should be using password management. So if you are not using a password manager of some kind, that being LastPass, dashlane, one password, all of them are sufficient for being able to manage a team focused password database, that you can share passwords securely, and create long, random passwords for all of your systems, no two passwords should be the same in any systems, right? Because if I get your password in one place, then I&#8217;m going to have that password in other places, and that that increases your attack surface. But if my private key is at least different, that is the password is different across all those systems, then I have a greater chance of being, you know, capable of stopping those bad actors. If you have a website, make sure that you have some kind of website security system set on it, you usually want what&#8217;s called WTF, which is a web application firewall, basically protecting your website from these kinds of attacks, just like you have a firewall on your your office, home office, and retail networks, you would have this kind of firewall on your website properties, okay. As I told you before, you should be having to factor in multifactor authentication. While SMS codes being texted to you for logging in is okay. It&#8217;s better to use an authenticator app, or some kind of security token that is one of those little dongles that I was talking to you about yubikey and Google Titan keys are those kinds, they&#8217;re very affordable. And they give you that level of physical protection, so that you&#8217;re able to protect access on that level. If you are thinking about securing on the web, think about CloudFlare. CloudFlare is has a free plan plan that allows you to be able to set up what&#8217;s called a content distribution network or a CDN that allows you to be able to protect your website from lots and lots of hackers, you know, basically, malware and cyber criminals who can attack you. And I talked about termsfeed, termsfeed, does policy generation, and making sure that you have your browser implementing that security policy as well. So there&#8217;s a bunch of browser extensions that you can install in your browser that allows you to be able to turn on HTTPS, right, that secure transit for you browsing the web, every time you go to an HTTP or an insecure website, it&#8217;ll give you a notification and say, Hey, do you want to go along to it? Um, there&#8217;s good reasons for you wanting to do that. But many times, it&#8217;s just a good alert to you that hey, by the way, why is this site not secure? And if you&#8217;re going to be placing data into the site, like I&#8217;ll go to a website if it&#8217;s just browsing data, but if it&#8217;s HTTP, and it&#8217;s asking me to put personal information into it, like my credit card number, or otherwise, no way, I&#8217;m not giving them my data, when they can&#8217;t secure their website, how can I trust that they&#8217;re going to secure my browser in that sense. So all kinds of good things in in terms of tools, and like I said, I&#8217;ll put links to those in the in the video description. And then I just wanted to close out with this resource. Since we&#8217;re talking about the NIST cybersecurity framework. If you go to nist.gov, hover over topics, then go to cybersecurity. And then once you get to the cybersecurity section, you can see here there&#8217;s the Small Business cybersecurity corner. If you click on that, you will then be taken to the Small Business cybersecurity corner of the NIST website, National Institute of Technology Standards and Technology. And an in here, you&#8217;ll find lots and lots of really great resources in terms of what you can do. So you can see here you can see the basics. You can pop out you can see planning guides, and all kinds of fun things and workbooks and tools and so on and so forth, for being able to get around the cybersecurity corner for small business, and it&#8217;s just really helpful to get all that information there. So We&#8217;ve had an hour together of me talking about the NIST cybersecurity framework. If you have any additional questions, or concerns or anything else like that, feel free to touch base with me and I&#8217;m happy to answer those questions. Please note that we are coming back next week and the week after that with with two guests. Next week, I have an attorney with me Michael Gips, a cybersecurity expert, really top notch guy who&#8217;s going to be talking about how to do that component when we talked about in the detect functions and the protected detect functions of the functions of the of the framework, really training staff and getting them aware, both you as a business owner, but also staff aware of how to protect yourself in a cybersecurity environment. He is going to be talking about those issues. And so I&#8217;m really excited to have Mr. Gips join us then. And then the week after that next Monday after that on the 26th. I think it is I&#8217;m going to have Vince Crisler, who is the CEO of dark cubed, and he&#8217;s a cybersecurity expert from he was once in the government, DOJ background and just top notch cybersecurity expert, we&#8217;re going to be talking about some of the cutting edge ways in which utilizing some of the cybersecurity can really be a competitive advantage in your small business. I&#8217;m looking forward to having both MR. GIBBS and Mr. Chrysler, join me the next two Monday&#8217;s of web and beyond live. As I noted at the top, I&#8217;m running a new community called web and beyond community, and you&#8217;re welcome to join us by going to www it needs to www www dot web and beyond doc community. Talking about cybersecurity, you have to go to the www Otherwise, you&#8217;ll probably get a little thing that says hey, this isn&#8217;t secure. But really it is secure if you go to www and and so you&#8217;ll be taken there and you&#8217;ll be able to sign in and join the community. It&#8217;s free and on doing events, roundtables, all kinds of fun things inside of the community. It&#8217;s nascent. So we&#8217;re just getting started. So join, ask questions, feel free to engage. I&#8217;m looking forward to building the community as we go. And so with that, that takes us to the end of this episode of web and beyond live and the NIST cybersecurity framework. I thank everybody for joining me here for this session and hopefully you have a great rest of the week marketing and managing on the web and beyond. I&#8217;m Ray Sidney-Smith with W3 consulting and W3C web services. Take care everybody

On today’s episode, we are going to be talking about franchising and how it fits into the economic development landscape. Franchising is a form of small business ownership that doesn’t get a lot of attention by economic development agencies around the States and I think it could use a bit of love. So, hopefully this will spark some conversations in the community. As well, we will discuss what it takes to start a franchise, some tips for picking the right franchise for you and your local community, and what are some of the most exciting franchises to invest in if you wanted to start a business. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://webandbeyondcast.com/ for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Faizun Kamal, Franchise Consultant CEO of The Franchise Pros Faizun Kamal is a nationally renowned public speaker and career strategist. As CEO of The Franchise Pros in partnership with The Franchise Consulting Company, Faizun coaches people nationwide on making the transition from employee to entrepreneur. She provides guidance to embrace chaos, fear, insecurity and uncertainty as doorways of opportunity to help individuals find their “perfect fit” business based on an assessment of their personal, lifestyle and income goals. She guides clients to move beyond career burnout to build a sustainable career that they love! Faizun’s drive to make a difference stems from her own personal experience as a corporate refugee. In 2015, after almost a decade in the corporate world, she was laid off. Instead of immediately jumping back into another job, Faizun began a deeply introspective journey to intentionally redesign her career, and her life. Through the world of franchising, she discovered a way to live a life of purpose, passion and profit! Her experiences as a former Fortune 15 Executive with 18+ years of experience in corporate, multinational, nonprofit &#38; entrepreneurial settings on three continents have made her an inspirational speaker to audiences worldwide. Faizun’s relatablity and authenticity has led her to grow an engaged following of thousands on social media. The Tory Burch Foundation named Faizun as “A Woman to Watch”. She has been featured extensively on Forbes, The Huffington Post and The Washington Business Journal, among many others. Faizun received her BA in Women’s Studies and Environmental Studies from Mount Holyoke College. She holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy and a Master’s in Business Administration from the Johns Hopkins University. She is also a graduate of Stanford University’s acclaimed Social Entrepreneurship Program. Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. The Client Questionnaire (CQ) &#8211; Use password: franchisenow The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don&#8217;t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber The Right Franchise for You: Escape the 9 to 5, Generate Wealth, &#38; Live Life on Your Terms by Faizun Kamal Follow Faizun Kamal on Social: On LinkedIn:   https://www.linkedin.com/in/faizunkamal/ On Twitter:       https://twitter.com/faizun_kamal On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/faizunkamalFRANCHISE/ Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360be9a4" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360be9a4" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360be9a4" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360be9a4" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Voiceover Artist 0:00 Welcome to web and beyond cast, where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond with your host gray Sidney-Smith. Welcome to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:16 I&#8217;m your host Sidney-Smith. Welcome, small business owners, entrepreneurs and community. This is Episode 14 of webbing beyond cast. On today&#8217;s episode, we&#8217;re going to be talking about franchising and how it fits into the economic development landscape. franchising is a form of small business ownership that doesn&#8217;t get a lot of attention by economic development agencies around the states. I think it could use a bit of love. So hopefully, this will spark some conversations, as well. We&#8217;ll discuss what it takes to start a franchise and some tips for picking the right franchise for you, you and your local community because that does make a lot of sense in the context, especially of what&#8217;s happening today. And so in order to do that, I brought the best I thought Why not go for the absolute person that I would recommend anybody to talk to when it comes to franchising, and that is Faison Kemal. She&#8217;s a nationally renowned public speaker and career strategist. as CEO of the franchise pros in partnership with the franchise consulting company, facing coaches people nationwide on making the transition from employee to entrepreneur, the Tory Burch foundation named Faison as a woman to watch. She has been featured extensively on Forbes, the Huffington Post and the Washington Business Journal, among many others. Faison received her BA in women&#8217;s studies and environmental studies from Mount Holyoke College. She holds a Master&#8217;s in Public Policy and a master&#8217;s in business administration from Johns Hopkins University. She&#8217;s also a graduate of Stanford University&#8217;s acclaimed social entrepreneurship program. Welcome to web and beyond cast Faison Ray, It&#8217;s so lovely to be here with you again, my friend. Thank you. It was the long preamble to say your hot stuff. You&#8217;re amazing and I&#8217;m really glad to have you here on the podcast. Unknown Speaker 2:00 To talk about franchising, and you recently came out with a book that I had the pleasure of getting early access to and reading and it&#8217;s been almost a year since that book came out. What does that experience been like for you? I think that&#8217;s kind of useful and interesting for folks who are new to you. Absolutely. It&#8217;s a thank you, Ray. It&#8217;s a I think it&#8217;s one of those things you never quite know, the scope of what you are opening yourself up to. Faizun Kamal 2:30 The book truly was a labor of love. It was actually a love letter to one person. And it was a love letter to that person who may be an employee who may be in the corporate world, and they feel they&#8217;re caught Unknown Speaker 2:45 their coldness in a lifestyle. They&#8217;re caught in work that they don&#8217;t necessarily care for. Unknown Speaker 2:52 And they believe they don&#8217;t have any other options. It&#8217;s for that person. Unknown Speaker 2:57 I was that person for many years, myself. Unknown Speaker 3:00 And so when I say love letter Unknown Speaker 3:04 it is it is me sharing my own very personal visceral story of my career path. And how I came to be in the world of franchising. Unknown Speaker 3:14 And the work that I now do with clients very much like me corporate refugees, who are now saying, Is there something else out there for me? So the book has been amazing re Truly, I just I could not have ever imagined what would have come out of it. Unknown Speaker 3:31 It&#8217;s available, as you know, on Kindle, it&#8217;s an E book. About a month ago, it came out on Audible as an audiobook. And then yesterday, it came out in paperback. So if you walk into your local bookstore COVID notwithstanding, you should be able to pick up a copy. And of course, you can always pick it up on Amazon. Unknown Speaker 3:51 But really, I would say it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s the emails. It&#8217;s the LinkedIn messages that I have gotten from Unknown Speaker 4:00 complete strangers. I&#8217;ve never met these people in my life. they&#8217;ve picked up a copy of the book, and they say, look, you know, in many ways, I am now in your shoes that you used to be. Unknown Speaker 4:13 reading your book has given me almost a roadmap to try and figure out if there is an option out there one, if it&#8217;s business ownership for me, what would that potentially look like? It&#8217;s been absolutely gratifying. Absolutely, the book is actually entitled The right franchise for you. And, and so I will put links to this in the show notes. And so you guys can Unknown Speaker 4:38 find it there. And I&#8217;m just really excited for people to get access to it. So let&#8217;s start off with kind of the agenda of what I plan to talk about today, which is to really cover three kind of lump sum areas. One is the alternative to corporate career. You know, as you said, You&#8217;re a corporate kind of refugee, and that is business ownership in France. Unknown Speaker 5:00 anchises one type of business ownership, how franchising works kind of what is a franchise? How does it fit into the current economic development landscape? And what does it really take to start a franchise? And then finally, how to determine if a franchise is right for you and you have a little bit of a little tool for folks to use which will hopefully help them do that. So let&#8217;s start off with franchising as a form of business ownership. How do you contextualize franchising for folks? Absolutely, I would say Ray, and this is the description my friend I use in the you know, the weekly webinars in lieu of the workshops I used to do pre COVID Unknown Speaker 5:41 something I always tell my my workshop participants, think of picture of shoe box. Picture any shoe box in your closet. When you become a franchisee, meaning you become you become a business owner in a particular business system. Your franchisor Unknown Speaker 6:00 Who&#8217;s your parent company the brand, the brand essentially hands you a shoe box Ray. And they say to you, here you go Ray, as our franchisee Unknown Speaker 6:10 everything that you need to know, all the systems, all the processes that you need to start the business and to overtime, grow it successfully. All of that is contained in this box. In essence re a franchise is a turnkey system. Unknown Speaker 6:29 It is a business in a box. It&#8217;s a business in a box because the franchisor very clearly lays out a playbook for you. You get an ops manual that says in order for you to be successful in our business, here are the things you need to start doing. And how do you know that these things that they ask you to do are indeed what&#8217;s going to grow your business because you should have if it&#8217;s a robust franchise that you entered, you should have a whole network of other franchise Unknown Speaker 7:00 He&#8217;s around the country, if it&#8217;s a national brand, or around the world, if it&#8217;s a global brand, who have followed the same exact playbook that you are now holding, and they have been able to create successful businesses. Unknown Speaker 7:14 Fantastic. And so I think about franchises and frequently what happens is people have a misnomer about what they are and and how they really operate. But what you&#8217;re saying is that each of those individuals is buying into a larger ecosystem that allows them as an individual business owner, that is, in most cases, a small business owner to then operate with a tried and true method for being successful. Absolutely. So thinking about the franchise, like just, you know, me as a person who&#8217;s outside of that ecosystem. Where does the franchise model fit in? Here we are in the covid 19 pandemic. And for those of you who are listening to this many, many years Unknown Speaker 8:00 In the future, your I hope that you didn&#8217;t have to deal with it. I hope your young people and you didn&#8217;t have to deal with it. But for those of us who are living through it, what do franchises offer as a an additional benefit or as a buffer against this kind of circumstance? Absolutely. What a fantastic question. What a timely question Ray. Unknown Speaker 8:21 I will tell you since COVID, hit us early March. Unknown Speaker 8:27 Almost every client who and by the way, I am busier now than I was pre COVID. And that saying something Unknown Speaker 8:34 the people that are coming to me Ray are exactly in that boat. So they&#8217;re saying they come to me and they say, either I have gotten laid off because of COVID or I&#8217;m in fear that I&#8217;m going to get laid off any day. Now. I&#8217;m reading the writing on the wall. Unknown Speaker 8:51 Look, I am 52 years old. Unknown Speaker 8:56 I have done ABC for the last 20 years. Unknown Speaker 9:00 Frankly facing I don&#8217;t know, is there a franchise out there for somebody with with my skill set? With my background? That ray is a question I get literally almost every single day with almost every single person I speak to. Here&#8217;s one of the biggest things that is so beautiful about franchising. So let&#8217;s say you come to me and you say, Zune, you know, I have been a VP of Marketing for ABC Company for the last 20 years. And this is my skill set. Here&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve been able to do. This is my day to day. Is there a business out there that fits who I am? The answer is probably yes, there is. But there&#8217;s a process that I&#8217;ll that we will walk through that will allow me to uncover if indeed there&#8217;s a franchise out there for you and to are you really suited to franchise ownership. Unknown Speaker 9:53 So the first thing with the franchise raid that so many people during COVID I think it&#8217;d be Unknown Speaker 10:00 attracted to, frankly, is the fact that when you go with a proven model, when you go with a brand, you are inherently reducing your financial risk. Think of somebody who gets laid off and says, Well, you know, I have done ABC for these many years. I&#8217;m going to go out there and start a business from scratch and go to consulting. Now there&#8217;s nothing wrong in doing that. Except every small business owner. You are the CEO and you are the janitor and you are everyone else in between for your business. You are nodding vigorously my friend. I Yes, indeed. Right. And yes, Unknown Speaker 10:39 exactly right. That there&#8217;s that laugh that knowing laugh you you know you feel stretched in all directions. 24 hours is just not long enough. And there&#8217;s a reason why small business owners feel so stretched thin all the time. In franchise ownership. However, if you are going with if you if you move forward with robust growth Unknown Speaker 11:00 The brand says something to you and they&#8217;re very clear about it. Okay, Ray, you&#8217;re now our franchisee, your These are your three to five top responsibilities as a business owner. And in most cases, Ray, it&#8217;s networking. It&#8217;s local marketing. It is doing consultative sales, whatever those key things are that that particular brand requires. The other stuff that typically as small business owners, we all do because you know, we don&#8217;t have the money to go pay someone to do it. So we do it ourselves. Those are the things that your franchisor is going to take care of for you in on the back end. I call these administrative tasks that if you as a business owner are spending your time on Ray, you&#8217;re leaving money on the table, my friend, and your franchisor is going to be crystal clear with you and they will say Ray, listen, if you are doing anything beyond these three to five daily tasks, you&#8217;re losing money. Unknown Speaker 12:00 You&#8217;re not doing what you need to be doing, again, tasks that directly impact your financial bottom line. Those are the things and only those things that you as the franchisee should be doing. I would say that it&#8217;s probably one of the biggest advantages of franchise ownership as compared to business ownership in its other forms, the risk reduction that comes with approval. Unknown Speaker 12:23 And are you seeing more potential franchise owners looking at different types of businesses right now because of COVID-19 are you looking are people choosing particular verticals to be in because they feel like it will buffer them against future current and future situations like this? What a great question. Let me give you a real life example. Unknown Speaker 12:47 My client who will Unknown Speaker 12:50 he will now have been a franchisee for two, maybe two and a half months, right. Unknown Speaker 12:57 So he literally, he went through the process and he Unknown Speaker 13:00 closed on his franchise as we were in the midst of the pandemic. By the way, they got a he and his wife got a scare. They thought their one year old baby boy had gotten COVID. They spent one day while he was in the middle of due diligence with me. I remember he spent the whole day driving around from hospital to hospital who would not allow them to come in. So it was I say that to you to say, these are the kinds of clients I work with. They&#8217;re motivated, they&#8217;re dedicated, they do what needs to be done, Devin, who? His background in his he used to be in the military. And he was an ops specialist. And he came to me, you know, I&#8217;m not laid off. I haven&#8217;t gotten laid off, but I have some medical issues. And I have always wanted to own my own business, but I just never really knew how and where to start. That&#8217;s a little bit about his background. So he came to me, and he ended up moving forward with a franchise that provides Pest Control services, right Unknown Speaker 14:00 So I want you to understand an op specialist. He&#8217;s now running a pest control business. Unknown Speaker 14:07 This is one of again, a second thing that makes franchise ownership so attractive to so many people. It&#8217;s a it&#8217;s that first question that people ask, Is there something out there for somebody with like me, somebody with my skill set? One of the key things that you and I will do, if we work together is for me to uncover what I call your transferable skill sets. Unknown Speaker 14:30 Now, will I be able to find you a franchise where you are doing exactly what you used to do in your prior job? Probably not. But will I be able to find you a business that allows you to use the skill sets that you use every day in your prior job? Absolutely, hell yeah. And that&#8217;s what this particular client is doing. By the way, he got to profitability day 27 after starting the business, in the midst of a global pandemic, in terms of Unknown Speaker 15:00 Vertical clients are buying businesses that provide need to have services. Unknown Speaker 15:07 That is what I&#8217;m seeing over and over again. So if you have rats running around in your basement, if you have something running around in your attic, you&#8217;re not just going to sit and wait for the pandemic to pass. You&#8217;re going to call someone in need to have services. Absolutely. Those have gone through the roof. Yeah, I&#8217;ve definitely seen more people inquiring about all of those businesses that fall into the into the areas of essential services that that many state governments have have coined as essential services. And certainly these kinds of businesses that are vital, no matter whether or not there&#8217;s a pandemic, and I&#8217;ve, of course, in my world where I&#8217;m dealing with digital marketing, most days, you know, I see a lot more people thinking about how to how to do these kinds of turnkey, online digital commerce type businesses. And so it&#8217;s absolutely true that people are going to look for things that are key to both being patient Unknown Speaker 16:00 demmick proof but also recession proof. And that&#8217;s really what I heard you saying in many ways is that, you know, there, if there are vermin running around my house economic downturn or not, I&#8217;m gonna go get that fixed. So I totally understand that. I&#8217;m curious from you. How do I know what it takes to start a franchise? Like, what what are the things that I should think about? If I were a potential franchise owner to kind of address that issue? What does it take to start a franchise? Perhaps right, and what a great question. Unknown Speaker 16:35 I think let me answer it for you in two ways. The first thing that I would say to anyone listening to our conversation right now who may be thinking is franchising right for me. Unknown Speaker 16:46 I get a little esoteric with you, my friend. Unknown Speaker 16:50 Are you someone who, Unknown Speaker 16:53 who always feels that they have traded their time for money? Unknown Speaker 17:00 Do you always feel that you are beholden to the job that even if it&#8217;s a night Even if it&#8217;s a weekend even if it&#8217;s a holiday, you still have to be present and on right? This is the world we find ourselves in. Unknown Speaker 17:15 I You Are you someone who has missed out on a lot of personal stuff, whether it&#8217;s your kids growing up Unknown Speaker 17:22 with your spouse or partner, when you look back, these are some regrets you hold in your heart. Are you someone who happens to be in a job or doing something that you know full well if you continue in that you really are never going to be able to retire and be financially secure. Unknown Speaker 17:43 And then very importantly, I think and this is this is a key for every client I&#8217;ve ever placed in a business re Are you really living life on your terms? Unknown Speaker 17:54 And my friend, your terms are going to be very different from mine is going to be very different from some Unknown Speaker 18:00 What else? But are you really living life on your terms? Are you doing work that excites you? Are you doing work that is valuable, and it pays you exactly what you know your worth. Unknown Speaker 18:10 If you&#8217;ve answered no to any of these questions, business ownership may be a viable option for you. So that&#8217;s the esoteric piece. The non esoteric piece, I would say is, Are you someone who is okay with having the flexibility to be able to run your own business on your own schedule? Pick your own clients, but you are not. Unknown Speaker 18:35 You&#8217;re not a Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, where you&#8217;re saying, I have to have the final say. So I&#8217;m going to create a completely new, entirely different market and commodities and services that people have never seen before. I&#8217;m okay with taking directions from my franchisor in following the playbook. Do you understand that there&#8217;s this nice little delicate dance they have to be able to do you are entrepreneur Unknown Speaker 19:00 Enough to run a business. But you should also be okay with taking some directions. If that is not you, my friend, you absolutely should not be looking at franchises. The biggest reason re that most people will lose the shirt on their backs either unwilling or they were unable to follow the directions of their franchisor. Fantastic advice. I&#8217;m curious in terms of when we think about the the archetypal individual who is addressing that. This is not on script. Some are going off a little bit on a tangent here, folks, but I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m a little bit curious, what are the things that if if someone was not going to be appropriate for a franchise? I know that from reading your book, I learned some things as not the ideal franchise owner. I&#8217;m not. Unknown Speaker 19:49 I I just know that about myself. I&#8217;m a control freak. everybody listening knows it. Unknown Speaker 19:55 I&#8217;m thinking what are the things that someone can excise from the French Unknown Speaker 20:00 Ty&#8217;s model. Right. And and I think, I think back to like Michael Gerber and the E myth, and how he talks about things, there&#8217;s still something to be garnered and gleaned from the idea of a franchise. And what do you feel like is maybe that one or two things that really a franchise model, just thinking about your own business in terms of a franchise model really helps with? I think, certainly, personally for me, Ray, it is being able to any doesn&#8217;t matter if you&#8217;re a teeny tiny business owner, you can absolutely do it the same way. A multi billion dollar corporation like Verizon is able to do and that is, when you find yourself doing something repeatedly. Perhaps you send the same kind of emails to clients when you begin working with them. Men realize that, could you use that over and over because what you&#8217;re doing in essence is you are taking out the unnecessary time of, of scripting a new email every single time Unknown Speaker 21:00 You send that to a new client. It&#8217;s a very silly, stupid, simple example. But my point is, franchises are all about systems. What systems as a business owner do you have in place? When it&#8217;s time for you to send a client an invoice? Do you start the process all over from scratch because you never really put together in place a system for yourself? Does that make sense to do that? If you are the CEO and the janitor and everyone else in between, you know how precious Your time is. So from from a time management and I think particularly now Ray right with COVID with I don&#8217;t know, if you&#8217;re a parent, my daughter school starts on Tuesday, I am already starting to lose my mind, thinking how I&#8217;m going to run my business and have my child, you know, move, finish one class and then go into another waiting room to get into a second class because she&#8217;s not old enough to be able to do that on her own yet. So think of all of the all of the Unknown Speaker 22:00 demands on our time now more than ever before. You&#8217;re a parent, you&#8217;re a business owner, you&#8217;re an employee, you&#8217;re a caretaker, you might have elderly parents at home, you need to be that much more efficient with your time. So systems, if you don&#8217;t have systems start thinking about what you can do in your own business. Absolutely. franchises provide this systemic approach to everything because they&#8217;re doing it for more than one person more than one business. And that&#8217;s kind of how I think about it. I think about Okay, if I had the same business in 40 different locations, not two, not three, but 40. How would I scale in that regard? And something as simple as a canned template, like an email template? You know, if you had to do that 40 times from scratch, would that make sense? And that&#8217;s the kind of thing that consistently runs through my mind whenever I&#8217;m thinking about these things. So thank you for that. I think that people who currently own a business and are listening and are thinking how can a franchise Unknown Speaker 23:00 helped me it&#8217;s thinking like a franchise or right. It&#8217;s thinking like, how do I create repeatable systems that someone 100 times could use and find success with it? And Ray, you didn&#8217;t ask me this, my friend, but let me just make mention for your listeners. If you&#8217;re a small business owner and you have zero desire to ever be a franchise, no worries, I will not take it personally. But do this. If you can put systems in place for your own small business, when the time in the day comes for you as the business owner to exit out of your business. Think about it, my friend, most people, they will either they pass away and the business dissolved. In some instances, the business owner, it&#8217;s a legacy business, they give it to their son or daughter to manage or a family member and they they exit out that way. In other instances, when small business owners are thinking about selling their business. Typically, small businesses only sell at a multiple of one Unknown Speaker 24:00 times total revenue. Unknown Speaker 24:02 And the reason they do that is that most small businesses don&#8217;t have any systems and processes in place. Think of how much you are upping your monetary value as a business, when the day comes that you&#8217;re getting ready to exit out and sell the business. When you can say, Yeah, absolutely. This is what I have in place. Here&#8217;s the processes I have in place for how to get a client, how to work with the client, how to close the client, how to build a client, whatever it is that your business does. So I think you know, just beyond franchising, it is such a great, best practice, Ray. That I think and I know for a lot of small business owners, we are so caught in the day to day of running the business that What do you mean exit strategy? No, I&#8217;ve never thought about that. It may be financially worth your time to be able to do that a little bit at least now. I always think that I&#8217;m I&#8217;m just morbidly inclined because I always think about the end. I&#8217;m always like, Well what happens if I die Unknown Speaker 24:59 and I Unknown Speaker 25:00 Want to make sure that people are taking care of you know, I think about the end. And I think, you know, why not do the things that are going to make it easier for people on the other side. So I really appreciate that. It&#8217;s not just gold, that is platinum, in my mind, in terms of thinking about the end of these things. Were there was there any other thoughts that you wanted to share with folks, before we get to the best tool of the week, because it kind of dovetails nicely with what you&#8217;ve been talking about? I think I&#8217;ll just leave folks with a thought. And that is, and it comes from my own life and the way I transition from corporate into the entrepreneurial world. Unknown Speaker 25:33 Whoever you are, wherever you are, remember that you are always going to be your best investment. Unknown Speaker 25:43 It&#8217;s you, it&#8217;s no one else, you will always get the highest return from yourself. So if you think of yourself as an investment, what does that next step look like for you? And by the way, it doesn&#8217;t have to be business ownership. It could be another job, but I think far too many times Ray kind of goes back to Unknown Speaker 26:00 So many people I work with who feel in their hearts, that they&#8217;re leading lives of quiet desperation. They don&#8217;t have any other option to, for me to say, That&#8217;s not true, you are your biggest investment, you are your best investment. So be very intentional and be very purposeful about what the next step of your career and your life looks like. I think that&#8217;s what I leave people with. That&#8217;s a wonderful piece of advice. And that brings us to our segment best tool of the week. So each week, I like to bring up something that I&#8217;m using and to give our guests an opportunity to talk about something that they have in terms of a tool or a tool they&#8217;re using. And today, a Zune you are offering a tool to folks that you use with your clients and talk to me a little bit about this. Absolutely. So you know, when folks come to me, I think I said to you one of the first questions they ask is I do ABC. Is there a franchise out there for someone like me, and how do I even know that I&#8217;d be good as a franchisee Unknown Speaker 27:00 This is a tool. It&#8217;s a very simple questionnaire, but it&#8217;s a sales and management aptitude questionnaire, that essentially, any client who chooses to work with me, that is their first step. And what this questionnaire for me does re is it helps me start to build a very foundational picture for who you are, how your head is oriented. And very importantly, would you be suited for franchise ownership? So if any of your listeners have that particular question, I would I would share that too with them. It&#8217;s It&#8217;s very simple, it&#8217;s fully online. I can send that to folks. And it&#8217;s a great way to get a sense for yourself a self assessment really, is this something that I want to you know, more than dip my toes into? Fantastic so we will put a link to this in the show notes for folks to be able to access and so go ahead and check it out and use the client questionnaire and see whether or not franchising Unknown Speaker 28:00 right for you. And and so my tool this week is stream yard. So for folks who don&#8217;t know, I&#8217;ve been going live every week for the past 37 weeks. So basically since January, I&#8217;ve been going live every week in kind of a pursuit of becoming more comfortable with being on camera. And being on camera. It is not difficult for me except for the fact that being on camera, when I can&#8217;t see the audience, I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m a I&#8217;m a trainer. So I&#8217;m very used to being in person with people and seeing their faces seeing when people&#8217;s eyes glaze over seeing when people get excited about something like I see the the counterintuitive perspective of somebody in the audience who looks angry, but they&#8217;re actually just really concentrating on what you&#8217;re saying. I&#8217;ve gotten to know that face and and so I&#8217;ve just been doing this every week, just to kind of get myself going. And I finally stumbled upon stream yard and I&#8217;ve been using it now for the past two months or so. Unknown Speaker 29:00 And I have to say, I&#8217;m really pleased with the application. And so if anybody has any questions about how stream yard works, feel free to but in essence very quickly, it allows you to be able to stream to YouTube Live Facebook, Periscope, which is the Twitter live functionality and other platforms. And I am able to go live on all of them simultaneously. And that&#8217;s really, really helpful. And, and so yeah, it gives you a little studio and I could say if Faison and I wanted to go live together, I could bring her into the studio environment, it synchronizes the comment thread. So all of us are able to see the comments from all the various platforms together, which is really, really helpful. And yeah, so I&#8217;ve just been really, really happy with the platform. They recently upgraded to allow for HD video, 10 ADP, video. So just lots of really good stuff going on with the platform and I&#8217;ve just been really happy with it. So that is my tool of this week. And so with that closing out, how can folks connect and get in touch with you Faison Unknown Speaker 30:00 Absolutely. I have been told, and you and I are connected on LinkedIn. So you would not be able to do this. But I&#8217;ve been told that apparently I&#8217;m the only physician come out on LinkedIn. So in a network of, I don&#8217;t know, several hundred million people, I&#8217;m the only face and come out so not super hard to find. I live on LinkedIn, right? That&#8217;s kind of where I am. Connect with me. They&#8217;re always happy to connect with people reach out, have a conversation, whatever you need, LinkedIn would be the place and I will put a link to all of your social profile links there on the show notes as well connect with Faison and and I really recommend it. And so thank you, Faison for joining us here on web and beyond cast. Thank you so much. It&#8217;s such a delight to talk to you my friend. Thank you always. That was Faison Kemal CEO of the franchise pros. Go find her and follower I like I said her social media links are there in the show notes and also check out her book the right franchise for Unknown Speaker 31:00 You escape the nine to five, generate wealth, and live life on your terms. Thanks for listening to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing the web and beyond. I&#8217;m your host Sidney-Smith. Until next time, here&#8217;s to your small business success on the web and beyond.

Each month, I cover the latest in G Suite and Google on a larger scale, and what changes affect Small Business. What&#8217;s New at Google, July 2020 Edition, my main topic I explore is how Google is integrating social features in Google My Business, after I cover all the updates to G Suite and changes among Google products and services that affect you. Enjoy!&#160; (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://webandbeyondcast.com/ for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Show Notes &#124; Google Is Integrating Social Features in Google My Business Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. G Suite Updates Blog: Dark theme now available for Docs, Sheets, and Slides on Android&#160; G Suite Updates Blog: Dark theme now available for Google Chat on Android and iOS&#160; G Suite Updates Blog: Coming soon: manage Google Chat and classic Hangouts chat settings from one place in the Admin console&#160; G Suite Updates Blog: Use Gmail alongside other iOS apps with iPad Multitasking&#160; G Suite Updates Blog: New Trash feature in Google Contacts&#160; G Suite Updates Blog: Set the default meeting length for Google Calendar events in your domain&#160; G Suite Updates Blog: Better visualize shorter meetings in Google Calendar&#160; G Suite Updates Blog: Automatically see shared calendars associated with a Google Group when you join it&#160; G Suite Updates Blog: Full color support and more updates to printing on Google Calendar&#160; G Suite Updates Blog: Simplify management of company-owned iOS devices with new Apple Business Manager integration&#160; G Suite Updates Blog: Improved Google Calendar event creation on the web&#160; G Suite Updates Blog: Google Docs mobile improvements: link previews and Smart Compose&#160; G Suite Updates Blog: Ring groups in Google Voice now generally available&#160; Our focus on helpful devices: Google acquires North&#160; Bringing free retail listings to Google Search&#160; Want to share your passion with the world? Get Keen&#160; Google Disables Important Google Photos Backup Feature&#160; How 9 major Google My Business updates in 2020 can help you rebound&#160; Google’s latest R&#38;D project is Shoploop, a mobile video shopping platform &#124; TechCrunch&#160; The Most Subscribed YouTube Channels &#124; Digital Trends&#160; YouTube rolls out new children’s privacy practices: What you need to know&#160; Google Cloud Claims Another Win With Box Partnership&#160; Google Cloud details Confidential Computing &#8216;breakthrough&#8217; &#8211; 9to5Google&#160; Google&#8217;s Remote Work Policy Has 9 Great Tips You Should Definitely Steal Today &#124; Inc.com&#160; Raw Text Transcript &#124; Google Is Integrating Social Features in Google My Business Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360c2e41" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360c2e41" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360c2e41" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360c2e41" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:07Hello, business owners entrepreneurs. Welcome to web and beyond cast, I am Raisa D. Smith and I&#8217;m the president of W three consulting. And I&#8217;m very excited to be back on the wagon with web and beyond cast our podcast for W three consulting. And as some of you may know, I was doing kind of a seasonal thing with the podcast. Now I&#8217;m going to be going to a weekly show. And so I&#8217;m looking forward to putting out weekly episodes, where I&#8217;ll be doing solo shows, I&#8217;ll be doing interviews, some roundtables, and otherwise. And so let&#8217;s get started. As some of you may know, I am the Google Small Business advisor for productivity. And what that means is, is that I work with the Google Small Business team out of Mountain View, to educate small businesses about the power of productivity using G Suite and the various pieces. Google products and its ecosystem. So each month, I&#8217;m going to be bringing to you an episode that is dedicated fully to Google to the Google verse. And that&#8217;s this episode, I&#8217;m going to be doing a what&#8217;s new at Google? monthly edition. And so let&#8217;s get started with this. What&#8217;s New in Google July 2020. edition, what I will be doing is going through all of the changes that affect you as a small business owner. And I&#8217;ll be closing out with a particular concentration on Google My Business this week. And I&#8217;m interested in kind of fleshing out where I think Google Small Business is going in the world of small business and Google Maps, and really how it&#8217;s going to be contextualized for you as a business as we make our way through both the covid 19 pandemic, but also beyond. So let&#8217;s get started with the updates this month for what&#8217;s new at Google. So first and foremost, Google has started to update all of their applications to help have dark theme on Android. dark theme is available for Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. You will now also find it in Google Chat on both Android and iOS. So we should be seeing that streaming out for all users across G Suite for all of those applications. For those who are very excited about dark theme in and across all of their applications, there should be a welcome thought. And just for those who may not be aware, dark theme is for low light conditions. Traditionally, where you might be in an environment where you are, you don&#8217;t want the bright white background to be shining into your eyes. I&#8217;ve actually also found it very useful in very high light situations so that the white lettering or the light colored lettering against the fully dark background is actually a better contrast ratio for me to be able to read that text. Okay, next up is that The ability to manage Google Chat and classic hangouts in the G Suite admin console will soon be coming to one location within the admin console. This is going to be very, very powerful. If it hasn&#8217;t already rolled out to you, it should be rolling out to you very, very soon. And it&#8217;s going to all G Suite customers. And you as a G Suite administrator can now manage both Google Chat and classic hangouts in the same space. This has been a little bit of a point of contention for some customers, and now they are solving that problem, thankfully. Okay, next up is something in the really cool productivity space. But if you use iPad on if you use Gmail on iOS devices, specifically iPads, you are now able to multitask with Gmail and other iOS applications. What that means is, is that iOS has split view. split view is the ability to be able to bring multiple applets On the screen at any given time, so you can bring up one application and bring up another one side by side and use those. And the newest iteration of Gmail. Google is now bringing that to the interface on iPad. So again, this should have been rolled out and released by now. So this was in early July. So by now you should have it across all of your various iPad devices. And so if you update to the latest version of Gmail, you have the ability to now have say, your Google Calendar, sitting next to your Gmail, and you can write an email saying, hey, by the way, I&#8217;ve got this event on Tuesday. How about we meet on Wednesday? Very, very handy. All right, next up is a solution to a problem I have experienced in the past, which is accidentally deleting contacts. And so now in Google Contacts, you will be able to find a trash can. So you&#8217;ll see a new folder called Hold trash or a new label called trash, and it will hold your contacts for 30 days before they&#8217;re permanently deleted. This is available across web, Android. and iOS on that would include Chrome OS and the other application platforms as well. And so this is really great. It makes it much easier for us to be able to recover contacts when we accidentally delete them, or say, an employee leaves and you know, is disgruntled and deletes all their contacts and and then, you know, leaves the office in a huff. And now you can go back and recover those, those deleted items in the trash can up to 30 days. Okay, the next series of updates in the G Suite world is all related to Google Calendar. And so Google has now given us the ability to set a default meeting length for Google calendar events underneath our domain, right. So in my particular case, you know, I have w three c Inc, calm as our G Suite domain and so calendar WCC Inc calm is our Google calendar page. And any events inside of that domain, I can now say, you know what, I want this to be 45 minutes long, for every default, every meeting as a default to load as 45 minutes in length. And now you can do that, okay, so you can set that default length, of course, and users can change it to the length that they want. But you can set it and say, you know, if you decide that you want your meetings, to default to 15 minutes, to give everybody 10 minutes to kind of get done with a meeting and transition to their next meetings, so they don&#8217;t have back to back 60 minute meetings, you can, you can now do that. And that&#8217;s very, very helpful. Next up in Google calendar is a feature that I&#8217;m really excited about, because seeing items just jam packed on my calendar and overlaid on top of each other is sometimes aggravating to kind of figure out where and what I&#8217;m supposed to be doing at any given time. So Google has now given the ability for events that are shorter than 25 minutes to actually take up less space in the Google Calendar interface. And so they look just like a shrunken version of it, the text is a little bit smaller, and it&#8217;s perfect. So, for example, every day I have I, my time that I walk the dog, which is kind of my, you know, start the day I get up, get walk the dog, and then I come back in, into into the office. And that&#8217;s kind of like my quote, unquote, commute to the office, you know, in the covid 19 pandemic times. And I just liked the idea of having that little anchor in the beginning and end of my day, but it&#8217;s just 15 minutes, you know, it&#8217;s just a walk in the morning in the walk in the afternoon, and it would take up a full block of time for either, you know, a, you know, 30 minute time block would be taken, and now it just shrinks it to that little 15 minute increment. And now I can see it taking up the appropriate amount of space. For it in my calendar, so really, really like that this also changes in the printed version of the calendar. So that&#8217;s really, really helpful in in talking about printing, Google Calendar now supports full color for printing. And so that means now when you go to print out a calendar, it will print out in the colors that you have set it for different events, including different calendar and event type colors. So you know, you can change the color of any specific event to another color and it shows that little primary calendar color in the little left hand sliver, and then the rest of the event is in the color that you changed it to. So really great. And you can print up to 24 hours of events per day to show you know on any, any calendar print, so it&#8217;s nice to be able to print things out when you want to. I have not printed out a Google Calendar. I have to admit in several years, but There was a time when I was printing my calendar every week to do a weekly review. And it was really nice to be able to do that. And quite honestly, now that these full color options are available, it seems like something that I might want to think about doing again. Okay, continuing on in the Google News Update. So now, when a user joins a Google group, they&#8217;ll receive an email listing the shared calendars that they can access by being a member of that group usually happens within about an hour of them joining that particular Google group. So it makes it much easier for new members of your organization employees and otherwise, to see the relevant calendars in the groups that they&#8217;re joining. And this is really helpful. It gets everybody kind of on the same page to say, Okay, here goes the team you&#8217;re in and these are all the calendars that that team has, so that you can quickly and easily give them access to those pieces. And they can go ahead and subscribe to the calendars, add them to their interface, show them or hide them as necessary and go from there. If you have iOS devices within your G Suite account as an admin, as the, you know, as a G Suite administrator, now, you have the ability to use now what&#8217;s called the apple business manager. And that allows you to be able to start managing your company owned iOS devices. And that&#8217;s just fantastic. Now you have a more seamless way of doing it, they used to have the develop device enrollment program at Apple. And in essence, your G Suite endpoint administration was a little bit more cumbersome. Now we&#8217;re able to integrate directly into G Suite and start creating that endpoint management as necessary. This is for a little bit bigger businesses. You know, if you&#8217;re running just a couple of iOS devices inside of an under 10 person shop, you&#8217;re probably not going to be dealing with this. But if you&#8217;re on G Suite enterprise, and you have a couple hundred employees and you&#8217;re dealing with iOS devices, This Apple business manager and the endpoint management upgrades are going to really be useful. Next up is a straggler. Back to Google Calendar, Google has updated their event creation on the web interface. So there have been a new number of improvements to the event creation workflow. And what you&#8217;ll see now is just a nicer and more detail in terms of black text being the most important things selected, and then smaller or grayed out text for the things that are secondary. And so right at the top now you see the big add Title field for you to give a title to the event. You can then change calendar date and time, and start and end time that is, and then you can see the time zone you can determine whether an event is going to repeat or not. You can add your guests. There&#8217;s a big prominent Google meet video conferencing button, one in which I&#8217;ve been struggling with lately, because it was automatically adding Google meat links to everything. Bye I solved that by going into the admin console and turning that feature off yet a second time. This time, hopefully it&#8217;s stuck. But you can also then add rooms and locations, you can add the description and attachments. You can see which calendar you&#8217;re creating the event from and its availability. So is it free or busy? Is it visible to everyone or not and what types of notifications are available for you to get an alert when the note when the event is coming up. They also see the four different chips for event out of office reminder and appointment slots, and just very quickly to jump over to the particular items that you want. So it&#8217;s just a it&#8217;s a much nicer experience. I feel like it&#8217;s a good new update, and it gives you just a nicer flavor for the experience of creating calendar events. So good on Google for doing that. Okay, just a couple of other minor updates to G Suite. Google Docs has gotten Some mobile improvements. So in essence, now when you click on links, you will get a preview of those. So if you click on it, you&#8217;ll get a preview, it&#8217;ll kind of show you what the what the item is all about. And what I&#8217;ve been seeing, at least on my devices often on is that it is showing you what it wants to know what it does now on web. So when you go to Google Docs on the web, and you click on on a link, so HTTP, colon slash slash your business name. com, if you click on that link, it will then show you that little link preview and it will say, hey, do you want to switch this to the title of the webpage. So if your business name.com really says services in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it will change the hypertext to that those words as opposed to the HTTP link just sitting naked there on the page. Very, very handy to just make it more readable and still leave it as a link to what you&#8217;re trying to get to. So I see that now happening in the Android and iOS experience for Google Docs. And I&#8217;m very happy to see that happening. They&#8217;re also adding smart compose, so that as you&#8217;re writing, if you have the feature enabled, it will then say, Hey, would you like to complete the sentence with X or Y, and all you have to do is either swipe or hit tab on the keyboard, and it will then go ahead and insert the text that&#8217;s there in the grayed out format. So you&#8217;ll see a little bit of grayed out text, that is the text it&#8217;s recommending to you. And now you can start to fill in kind of the blanks of what you&#8217;re trying to say before you type it, which is incredibly productive. And last but not least in the G Suite updates for this month, is something that we have been testing out internally, and I&#8217;m super excited to see it coming. Google Voice is now now has ring groups. So when you have automatic call routing rules enabled with a ring groups in Google Voice, you can now have multiple people in your organization. Make it receive calls from the same Google Voice number. This really makes for the whole integration within a business seem seamless. So now you have a generally available, it should roll out to all users who have access to Google voice within the organization, you can do simultaneous or random order, call routing. So you can, you know, just call everybody all at once or you can have it choose a specific operator to pick up the phone. You can determine who in the ring group can make outbound calls. And then you can use that ring group number as the caller ID. So doesn&#8217;t matter who&#8217;s making the outbound call, it all shows the same caller ID to your customer, you can determine what happens if no one answers the call, does it route to a voicemail message does it go to a particular individual, again, what happens and then you can also determine business hours so you can ring that group during particular hours and you can say, Okay, I want this to go to this voicemail message. box when we&#8217;re in off hours. So this is really giving us an enterprise level phone system. That is all done in the cloud. And this is just phenomenal because you&#8217;re just paying one rate for your G Suite account to have these access privileges to be able to do this kind of stuff. And it&#8217;s all just built in to the G Suite interface. So leaves administration easy, and you can just set it up in minutes, and you&#8217;ve got yourself a full fledged phone system, you&#8217;re still going to need your your either cell phone or local phone system, you know, phone lines for managing this, but you are replacing all of the equipment and management of the systems that are necessary to route calls and so on and so forth, especially as we are now in this remote work phase and having to deal with a distributed workforce. You can now set this up and you don&#8217;t need any additional equipment to have a really high class phone system. I&#8217;m on to now some non G Suite news. So Google has announced that they have acquired north. Now north is a fairly unique company. They actually started with some very high tech technology they called Mio, which, quoting from their website was a quote, gesture based input device that directly coupled neuromuscular impulses into signals computers could understand and quote, and then they quickly shifted gears to what is now known as smart glasses. So in essence, they are glasses with embedded technologies to bring them into the connected world, the IoT world, in their particular case, they do direct retinal projection, and they also are prescription compatible. And so Google has acquired them, they have not said anything about what&#8217;s going to happen with the company. So they have shut down sales of the of the product and they&#8217;re probably going down. for some period of time, but what this tells us is that Google has not given up on the Google Glass project. We know that Apple is in the works to bring out an apple glasses type product. Amazon has their own out. Now, Bose has some version of smart glasses that are on the market, mostly attuned to, obviously, audio files, who are who are trying to listen to music. So the smart glasses market is still something that is being determined. And Google is working on that in the background. And it&#8217;s very exciting to kind of hear this news of them making this acquisition and seeing what they&#8217;re going to be doing with that. Moving right along. Google has announced that they are bringing free retail listings to Google search. So in the past Google Shopping, which is the section of Google that when you type in any product in Google determines that you&#8217;re looking to purchase a product. It takes you over to Google Shopping. So if I were to type in Men&#8217;s dress shoes into Google right now, it would know that I was looking to purchase men&#8217;s dress shoes, and it would take me over to shopping.google.com or google.com, forward slash shopping. And then show me the products that were available either near me or available to purchase through e commerce that was once free. You could put that into your Google Merchant Center, you would then be able to provide a product feed, and voila, Google would syndicate your e commerce site products into the Google search algorithm in Google Shopping. They then started to start to add advertising fees for people to be able to do that. So instead of you being able to just put your feet in there and get it out there for free, they started charging you to be able to do so well, as of the end of June and early part of July. Google has now started to make those listings free for most businesses, so it&#8217;s across Raymond Sidney-Smith 19:56a wide variety of their categories. So if you have never used Google Google Merchant Center, I highly recommend that you head over to the Google Merchant Center, just Google Google Merchant Center, and then figure out how to get your e commerce sites product feed. If you don&#8217;t have one, have a developer get you one. You might even need to change platforms in order to do that. But it&#8217;s a really powerful and great opportunity, especially during during this economic downturn, to be able to have Google taking your products and just feeding them into its algorithm. So very, very powerful. And good on Google for making it free again, next up is Google has a division they call area 120. And it&#8217;s where they develop new interesting products and services. Well, one of those experimental projects is keen. And and Google has recently released keen so keen is basically a an area where they&#8217;re able to replicate what kind of looks like a little bit of of Pinterest, and a little bit of Instagram in an environment. And so what they say is is that Keane isn&#8217;t I&#8217;m quoting here from the the Google blog post announcing it, it says that keen isn&#8217;t intended to be a place to spend endless hours browsing. Instead, it&#8217;s a home for your interest. It&#8217;s a place to grow them, share them with loved ones, and find things that will help in making this precious life count and quote, so I haven&#8217;t installed came yet but I plan to, and I&#8217;m really looking forward to seeing what Keane is all about. So it&#8217;s available both on web and as a as an Android app. And I will report back to you in the next couple of months. But if you want to check it out, you can go to stay keen sta y ke n calm and install it on your Android device or sign in through Google through the web, and check it out and see what it&#8217;s all about. And it looks like you know, just a card based system for you. Being able to organize and appoint different thoughts into a visual interface. So we&#8217;ll see how it all comes together. But you know, with Google, they like to test these things, and then see if they stick. Alright, next up, we are taken to Google Photos. Google is disabling Google Photos backup for folders that are on your system and backed up automatically. So images that are saved onto your device by messaging apps, specifically, those folders will no longer be backed up by Google&#8217;s Google Photos cloud based service by default. In essence, you&#8217;ll have to go in and you&#8217;ll have to turn those folders back on to update now they&#8217;re doing this because during this pandemic situation, there&#8217;s been an unprecedented amount of bandwidth being used by people. And so they&#8217;re just making people aware that you need to turn this on. So if you have WhatsApp or messages through Facebook Messenger, otherwise kik is another one of those apps. They&#8217;re in Turning that function off you, you will need to go into it and turn them back on in order to be able to turn on backup and sync for those folders. There are instructions in the article that talks about it. You can find instructions in the show notes from that article moving right along. And back to Google Shopping. Google has launched another project out of area 120. This one this time is called shop loop. And shop loop allows influencers to create product demonstrations, so to speak, think of it as a mobile video, virtual shopping space, kind of like a trade show or an expo where you get people to come and look at your use of products in your environment. Okay, you can think of this akin to home shopping network or QVC and other kinds of, of home shopping channels. other platforms have brought them to bear so Amazon live is currently doing something similar. YouTube has the shoppable ad format already. And so they&#8217;re using this in a little bit of a different way. Facebook has something similar with live shopping, where you can, in essence, do a virtual trunk show. And now Instagram, of course, has their own shop destination. So all of these social networking platforms are trying to get in on the ecommerce boom, that&#8217;s kind of happening during the pandemic. And shop loop is right there in the fold. They&#8217;re trying to really help uncover trends that haven&#8217;t yet happened. So they&#8217;re trying to kind of bring the new trends to the table, allowing for influencers and creators to talk about what they&#8217;re using and how they&#8217;re using it and having people experience it. I&#8217;m going to install the application myself, and check it out. And I&#8217;ll let you know what I learned as we move ourselves along. So it&#8217;s currently a progressive web application, meaning that it works on any device, you just have to go to shop loop dot app, and you can then load it into your phone. Next up is that Google ranks its YouTube channels by the number of people who subscribe. And that is the primary vehicle by which many of us see the success of our channels, we see how many people subscribe, and that then usually correlates very closely to how many people few videos on our channel, generally, I just thought it was recent, very interesting that Digital Trends gave us a list of the Top 10 YouTube channels. And I&#8217;m just going to list them here so that you can get an understanding of them and then really take away some important points about what happens on YouTube and why. So starting from the the number 10. And going up to the number one slots, number 10 was actually WWE, the wrestling network. They&#8217;re at 63 million users then Next one number nine is five minute crafts at 67 point 4 million users. I didn&#8217;t even know five minute crafts existed before seeing this top 10 channels chart. We then have sports the sports YouTube channel at 75 million set India I&#8217;m not even sure what that is. But I&#8217;m guessing it&#8217;s a a channel focused on things happening in the country of India 77 point 5 million subscribers. The gaming channel on YouTube is 85 point 6 million cocoa melon Nursery Rhymes at 88 point 6 million directed at children PewDiePie the unfortunate and notorious, probably racist youtuber he&#8217;s got 100 5 million subscribers which is both amazing and unsettling at the same time. Then there&#8217;s the music channel on YouTube at 100 12 million subscribers youtube movies has 117 million and T series 146 million subscribers. And so when we look at this just from a general overview of the number of subscribers and the ones that have the most. So for example, the T series, most people don&#8217;t know, but they&#8217;re popular Indian music channel. So at 100, and you know, 46 million subscribers, they&#8217;ve had 100 16 billion views over the course of its time. We know that people are coming to YouTube for entertainment, they&#8217;re coming to be entertained first, and then they&#8217;re coming to solve problems next. That&#8217;s why parents come to YouTube to play Coco melon nursery rhymes. So we could take some very universal principles, when it comes to us as business owners publishing content on YouTube is to first figure out what is going to be useful and entertaining to people on YouTube, and then produce that kind of work. Okay, it&#8217;s really important For us to be able to understand that people are coming for usefulness and entertainment. And can we be both of those when we&#8217;re producing video for YouTube, so YouTube in working to really comply as well as get ahead of regulatory affairs in other countries, as well as other states in the United States. They are responding to the California consumer Privacy Act by putting in some more controls for kids content. So if you are producing content, and it&#8217;s not for children, make sure that you do not check that box that says this is children&#8217;s content. That&#8217;s a way to get yourself banned on YouTube. But on the other side of it, if you do check that box, just understand that you may see different options turn on and off when you go ahead and turn kids content on that is this content is for children. So just be mindful of that as you&#8217;re moving forward. There&#8217;s a video in the show notes I highly recommend Watching it if you do have children, as your primary viewers, Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:03a couple of recent wins by Google, Forbes has put out an article. And they&#8217;re just noting the fact that Google has recently won. A partnership with box box is akin to Dropbox. And Google Drive and other cloud storage services and file sharing. And box is now moving to Google Cloud. So this is really phenomenal. This is this is bringing yet another major service and a major company to the Google Cloud environment. If you don&#8217;t know Google Cloud is what is actually the umbrella business that contains G Suite, and many other cloud hosting services. And so if you&#8217;re doing anything in the Big Data space, Google Cloud handles that it&#8217;s akin to Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. And recently, Google One a contract with Deutsche Bank. They most recently got a public sector contract with the United Kingdom. They got Major League Baseball MLB to join their services in this past March. And so they&#8217;ve been making some really good inroads in bringing more of these cloud vendors and other businesses, organizations and governments on to the Google Cloud Platform. And I&#8217;m just excited to see box joining them. For me, it&#8217;s actually about when they&#8217;re all on the Google Cloud system, like Evernote is Evernote runs on top of Google Cloud, while they&#8217;re separate islands. They&#8217;re using a lot of the same technologies in the background, which makes their integration in my perspective, hopefully easier. So hopefully Evernote and say box and other tools that are sitting in Google Cloud can now integrate more easily because they&#8217;re using the same background infrastructure. So they announced this at Cloud Next, which is Google&#8217;s enterprise conference that they Hold every year, this year, they did it virtually. And so they actually extended it over the course of nine weeks. And in one of their announcements, they announced that they were actually capable of using technology to encrypt data while in use. So what that really means is that a new level of confidential computing is going to come Raymond Sidney-Smith 31:22to pass. They&#8217;re calling it confidential computing. What this means is that if you&#8217;re using G Suite, you will now be able to, presumably in the near future, encrypt your transmitting of data. So as you are sending data back and forth between you and a customer, you&#8217;re actually capable of having that encrypted in transit. And that&#8217;s just really remarkable. It&#8217;s writing to the database in an encrypted format, which just increases the level of security by far meaning that even if the data was was captured or you know, in somehow intervened in a It would be intervening with encrypted data. And so it would just be a blob to the hackers. This is a really, really cool new development. And I know that it sounds a little bit geeky on the front end. But from a from a business perspective, having your data both encrypted at rest and in transit is a powerful, competitive advantage. Because people who do not have this happening means that their data in some way, shape or form is not as secure when it is being utilized. And Google is bringing that for those people who are on Google Cloud. So I&#8217;m very excited to see it. I&#8217;m looking forward to seeing more data come out about how it&#8217;s going to be utilized and when it&#8217;s going to be implemented in G Suite and other products across the Google ecosystem. One more story before kind of what I wanted to dive in on today, which is that Google recently announced nine tips it within their remote work policy, and I encourage everyone To start the process of creating a remote work policy for your business, we are going to be in this either virtual working environment working from home remote working experience for quite some time as we have this protracted both shutdown and recovery period because of the covid 19 pandemic, and really, because of the lack of leadership being shown in managing this crisis for small businesses, so Google came out and they announced these nine particular items. Now they focused on four real fundamental areas. And I&#8217;m just going to cover these nine items thereafter. And you can go check out the Inc article that I have linked in the show notes, but they really focus on four areas, and in this order, well being, performance, connectedness, and productivity. And so as you can imagine, the productivity part really speaks to me, but for well being, performance, connectedness and productivity. And these are the recommendations just in highlight, and I&#8217;m quoting here from the article number one, make team meetings a priority. Number two, show personal interest. Number three, be present. Okay? Don&#8217;t go drifting off when you&#8217;re in meetings with people. Number four check in, it&#8217;s really important to have things like virtual coffee breaks, and other kinds of mechanisms to be able to check with people, either on a daily basis or otherwise, about their work days about their weekend plans, and so on. so forth. Raymond Sidney-Smith 34:31Number five, recognize your teammates, really show them appreciation and give them reputational enhancements, you know, give them accolades, and so on and so forth to make them know that they&#8217;re doing the right things. Number six, invite colleagues, participation, invite people to join you in work that you&#8217;re doing. Number seven, set team norms. These are this is a new working environment. So you really have to set some cultural standards Some culture in place for people to be able to know what they should be doing. Number eight, use the right medium. Not everything&#8217;s right for email, not everything&#8217;s right for a phone call, and everything&#8217;s right for a video meeting, determine what&#8217;s going to be the right medium for being able to have interactions. And number nine, make well being a priority. They should have probably made that number one. But being made it number nine, we just don&#8217;t make well being a priority. We are in the midst of a pandemic, and they want to make sure that people are taking care of themselves, you should be worried about taking care of your employees as well. So go ahead and do that. Make sure that they&#8217;re setting time limits on their work day, make sure that they&#8217;re taking care of their health, making sure they&#8217;re they&#8217;re setting up an office space that is ergonomic and safe for them to be working in. These are all really important features. And it&#8217;s good for Google to be highlighting this and making this available to everyone else. In closing out today&#8217;s episode what I wanted to do was to talk about Google My Business and Search Engine Land recently put out an article called How nine major Google My Business updates in 2020, can help you rebound. And what they did was they went over the nine major updates. And what I wanted to do was to just sort of contextualize how I see Google My Business really changing in the near term, both in the face of COVID-19, but also really, in how Google really sees Google My Business are kind of making a play across different areas. And I&#8217;m interested to talk that through with you. So first and foremost, they have updated their system to allow for you to have a temporarily closed status. As I said, we&#8217;re kind of having different shutdowns, different reopenings happening across different regions of the country and the world. And so Google now has an option to select yourself as temporarily closed so that people know that you&#8217;re not open right now. So they can trust themselves to go to Google Maps and to find out the status of what your business is in, I highly recommend that you install the Google My Business app so that you&#8217;re able to make those changes within the application on your mobile phone on the fly. Google has also taken your chain restrictions off of posts. So once upon a time, if you don&#8217;t know, there&#8217;s a feature called posts with Google, and you&#8217;re able to post onto your Google My Business listing well chains, that is businesses that have more than 10 locations, where once restricted from being able to post to the posts with Google, now they are lifting that restriction. So you&#8217;re now able to post across multiple locations if you have more than 10 locations. Google has also added a new COVID-19 post type. So if you go to that post with Google section, click on posts you&#8217;ll see the various chips across the top you&#8217;ll see offers and what&#8217;s new and so on so forth events. One of those options is going to be COVID-19 update. So if you need to push a COVID-19 update out to your your followers, you can go ahead and do that. There are also some new Google My Business attributes and displays. quoting here from the Search Engine Land article. They say Google added new attributes for businesses to add curbside pickup, and no contact delivery, which have been essential for restaurants and retailers. And they go on to say that not only are these attributes above the fold that is in the Google search engine results page, but Google notes their existence with a checkmark or x that makes the attribute even more visible. If these attributes are available to you. It&#8217;s critical that you use them and make sure they are accurate, Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:36it&#8217;s likely that these these attributes will be permanent, especially as curbside pickup becomes more popular among large chains. So and quote. So this is really, really powerful that they are actually adding these other new attributes and making them so prominent in the feed for search results. Okay, Google has also made their local service ads expanded, so You&#8217;re able to actually add more features within the local service ads. So for example, you can have video appointments, you can have video estimates you can accept on site jobs or urgent jobs, you can determine what the health and safety functions or features are of a particular business. So really great for those businesses that have to go into a home and do work at homes. These local services, ads or local service ads really helped to add these attributes so that customers feel safe about how people are going to be working on in their homes and other environments. They have additionally, for healthcare businesses, provided functions for telehealth and COVID-19 information links. So if you&#8217;re in that space, you now can add that function. You can add that information to your Google My Business listing so that you don&#8217;t get inundated with requests. Google has also added for businesses the ability to have support links and donation links, meaning that in your listing, you can say hey, I Need you to buy gift cards from my restaurant or cafe, and you can now have a gift card function on that page. You can also have donation links to lead people to a donation space to donate to say a crowdfunding platform page or otherwise, while you&#8217;re shut down, you can identify also secondary hours for people. So if you&#8217;re a grocery store, and you want to have SR hours listed separately from the normal operating hours, you can go ahead and do that. Now, inside of your Google My Business listing, I imagined that this is going to stick around Search Engine Land also agrees that this is going to be normal for the rest of time. They also added some safety features into Google Maps. So across the top of your screen now you&#8217;ll see some chips, some little buttons and those buttons will say takeout and delivery and so on so forth, three to quickly get to things, but there are also some features that are there for public transit. So it will say something like public train For services may be impacted due to COVID-19. And you can go ahead and see that based on where you&#8217;re going and how you&#8217;re getting there. So it&#8217;s just useful to be able to see these kinds of things and alerting you that there are changes as they&#8217;re happening. And so, as we can see, there have been a lot of changes that Google My Business has been making to the interface to make it useful for Google Maps users, people who are searching Google universal search when they go to google.com. But also when they&#8217;re searching on their mobile devices, for locations and for places that they may be wanting to shop from. What this really means to me, though, is that Google has made a number of different changes to the platform that make me think that Google wants more and more people to use GMB as a social space. Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:50And I&#8217;ll give you a couple of examples. One is that Google has recently in Google Maps given a much nicer experience It was available before, but this is a much nicer experience, say that someone is coming over for dinner. And they say, Hey, I&#8217;m leaving for dinner, and they send me a link. Well, they can, they can share within the Google Maps application, a real time link that shows them on the map moving toward my home. And Google has also now given businesses on the GMB side, the Google My Business side, the ability to post and have followers to those posts on their Google My Business listings. So what they&#8217;re doing is they&#8217;re giving a little bit of social on the personal side, inside the Google Maps side, they&#8217;re giving more social posting capabilities on the business side. And they&#8217;re starting to test to see how people feel about using Google My Business and Google Maps more generally, as a place for people to be able to interact in these pro social ways. What I&#8217;m doing Thinking is that Google is going to make this a tighter integration across the board with GMB, Google My Business being more of a social platform akin to Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. And they&#8217;re just going to slowly but surely get into the background. They don&#8217;t want to make anything splashy, they don&#8217;t want to Google Plus, that&#8217;s gonna, you know, you know, say, Oh, this is Google&#8217;s next, try it social. You can see that Google has done this with Google Photos and the ability to message and share photographs in the background. They&#8217;re adding social media features into their products in these very light touch ways. And I think that Google, my business is now the next product to get some of these light touch useful social features. They&#8217;re going to try and make Google My Business more and more social. And I&#8217;m looking forward to seeing how that all works out in the long run. So that&#8217;s it. That is my first what&#8217;s new Google, this being the July 2020 edition for the reboot of the web and beyond cast podcasts. And I&#8217;m really glad and happy that you all have found me here. Before we end this cast. If you have a comment or a question, feel free to visit the podcast episode page at web and beyond cast.com. And you can send me a direct message right there, click on contact on the website. And you can ask us a question, you can suggest a topic that you&#8217;d like me to cover here on web and beyond cast and a future episode, and so forth. Also, if you&#8217;re able to help us out, if you can leave a rating or review on Apple podcasts or Stitcher or whatever app you use that allows us to leave a rating and review. That&#8217;d be really fantastic. That helps us bring new small business listeners to the fold to grow the web and beyond cast community. And so thank you, thank you for listening. Thank you for rating and reviewing. And with that, thanks for listening to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond. I&#8217;m your host Raisa Smith. Until next time, here&#8217;s to your small business success on the web and beyond. Download the transcript (PDF).

Hello there, Small Business owners, entrepreneurs, and community! Welcome to Episode 12, of Web and BeyondCast. This episode is part of our new Business Startup Series on Web and BeyondCast, where we’ll discuss issues specifically related to small business startup and management issues. To do that, I’ll be bringing on startup experts from around the world to discuss issues that are pertinent to startup entrepreneurs. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://webandbeyondcast.com/012 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) As an SBDC consultant, I hear clients ask the question all the time, do I really need a business plan? And, the answer is always the same: yes. But, many resist for all kinds of reasons. They don&#8217;t understand what a business plan is and how it&#8217;s constructed, they&#8217;re concerned it&#8217;s going to take too much time (instead of simply getting started on it), and they believe it&#8217;s a do-it-and-done document you never look at again. All of these things couldn&#8217;t be further from the truth, albeit a business plan will take the time it takes to assemble. Thankfully, there are SBDCs and experts, like my guest today, who can demystify and help you with building your startup business plan! If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Robin Suomi, MBA, is an experienced small business expert and founder of Startup to Growth, LLC. &#160;Working with clients remotely through video meeting platforms, she helps clients answer their technical business planning questions. She also encourages them to dig deeper, dream bigger, and works with them to create their Success Steps! &#160;Check out the website for ongoing How to Start a Business and Business Plan Boot Camp workshops and seminars, as well as 1-1 small business coaching and group coaching, including QuickStart Mastermind and Growth Mastermind groups. Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. NAICS Code Search Tool Best Tool of the Week Enloop Runner-Up: SBA Business Plan tool Honorable Mentions: Bplans Liveplan Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360c6ab4" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360c6ab4" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360c6ab4" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360c6ab4" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Unknown 0:00Welcome to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond with your host Ray Sydney Smith. Hello there small business owners, entrepreneurs and community. Welcome to weapon beyond cast. This episode is part of a new and hopefully ongoing series called Business Startup series which will publish about every five to 10 episodes on web and beyond cast. And this is where we&#8217;ll discuss issues specifically related to small business startup and management issues. Today on this show, we are going to be talking about and really answering the question Do I really need a business plan? It&#8217;s a question that I get all the time and I&#8217;m sure that my guest today on the show gets quite often as well. I have on the show and I&#8217;m pleased to have on the show my colleague and friend Robin Sumi owner and founder of startup to growth, LLC, a small business coaching, mentoring and educational firm. I know Robin, originally from her time as executive director of Loudon Small Business Development Unknown 1:00center where she spent over nine years helping thousands of small businesses through seminars one on one counseling and business planning classes. She&#8217;s also been an adjunct professor at Northern Virginia Community College teaching entrepreneurship and small business management and Introduction to Business courses. She&#8217;s created a curriculum for business plan boot camps, and she&#8217;s worked with small businesses from every industry. And so Robin, welcome to web and beyond cast grey. Thank you for inviting me. I&#8217;m so happy to be here today. I&#8217;m excited about our conversation. You&#8217;re such a strong supporter of success businesses general I loved working with you through the years and being your friend and colleague. And so thank you. I&#8217;m really delighted to have you. And so we&#8217;re going to be talking today about business planning. And I know that it&#8217;s a it&#8217;s a it&#8217;s a big topic and we&#8217;re going to try to spend the time we have together on what and why a business plan is necessary because there are a lot of people out there who say, Oh, well, you don&#8217;t need a business plan. You just you know, go go create one and I think Unknown 2:00today&#8217;s conversation is going to help us answer that affirmatively and decisively from now on so let&#8217;s let&#8217;s start off with what fundamentally is a business plan? I think a lot of people don&#8217;t actually know Ray that&#8217;s such a great question in a nutshell a business plans are written document that describes your business idea, your product, your services, and how you&#8217;re going to establish a sustainable business from that idea. That&#8217;s it. It&#8217;s your guide your roadmap in words to starting and then growing your business your dream the way you want it to grow its complete with goals and objectives. I say crust the fear and step into definition plan. A lot of business owners can get so much out of understanding what a business plan can do for you once they really understand fundamentally that&#8217;s what a business plan is there&#8217;s quite a bit of talk out there about business plans versus what are called Lean Startup canvases and these kitschy one page business plans that everyone talks about. Can we talk about Unknown 3:00little bit about what the differences between these and the business plan are. Unknown 3:06I believe that all planning is worthwhile. And you&#8217;re absolutely right. The business world is a fire with I don&#8217;t really need a business plan, I&#8217;ll just do a one, this one page business plan in 10 minutes, I&#8217;ll be fine and not so much. I think that all planning is worthwhile no matter what form it takes, whatever you use to get you started into the planning pathway I&#8217;m happy about. So I say I welcome the one page business plans for that reason, are they enough? I don&#8217;t believe that they are. Some plans are better than others. I believe that everything you do in life can be used somewhere. So when you&#8217;re using those tools to get you started, it might shorten your trial and error period down the road. It&#8217;s like a feasibility study. At the end of the day, you need a business plan and I&#8217;m talking about a formal plan the lean startup process where you&#8217;re shortening the product development cycle, getting the good enough product out there. Sometimes that works and sometimes it does not the minimum viable product if it&#8217;s not good enough, it hurts your brand that I believe you&#8217;ve hurt yourself. not helping. Unknown 4:00yourself at the end of the day, if it were that easy, we&#8217;d all be billionaires. And it depends. So those are the two answers. I give most small businesses and this falls devil&#8217;s advocate here. I&#8217;m a small consulting business startup. And I have say one major client, why do I need a business plan and this goes for a new food truck business online store that&#8217;s selling say handmade crafts Why do any of these businesses need business plans? Unknown 4:29Another excellent question the person the small business owner that has one major client is actually one of my major clients because say they&#8217;re in the federal contracting field they think they have a contract for years and all of a sudden that contract cancels or their consultant their their major client they&#8217;re only client goes out of business has it has a business change or they get notified that a contract is ending in the next six months and they&#8217;re like oh my goodness I have no idea I started shop I had this client I thought it was fine. They&#8217;re not a business plan would do away with all Unknown 5:00All of that because there would be a marketing plan in place would be a diversification plan in place. Say you are a food truck, you still need a business plan. You&#8217;re always monitoring your competitors what the food trends are looking at a landing new corporate clients, there&#8217;s always a reason to be planning ahead. You never know what the environments going to bring you the online store, great example. Trends change even in homemade cards. I&#8217;m here to tell you everything changes. The millennials have changed a lot of our different marketplace so they have a recyclable card. Maybe that&#8217;s a new product line they could bring it that would really attract the millennials, maybe they want to give away us a certain portion of their profits to a cause that would be attractive to the millennials are so many reasons to have a business plan even in these very simple operations. We&#8217;re not talking to 30 page plan. I think it&#8217;s really knowing what you&#8217;re doing. Recognize that no matter what size of the business you have a business plan is as you said, I love the term feasibility study. I think that&#8217;s I think you&#8217;re right on point there, Robin that people need to really fundamentally recognize Unknown 6:00is is this business feasible, and the business plan not only helps you make that determination, but once you do make that determination, it now allows you to go forward with confidence. Now, I know that you talk about your basically five reasons for preparing a business plan. Ultimately, what is the consequence of both writing a business plan and of those that do not prepare a business plan before they go into business? Unknown 6:29Let&#8217;s get into my five points. The first point I have is fail on paper. First, when I&#8217;m working with clients, or when you&#8217;re doing your own business plan, you come to maybe the financials portion, or the marketing portion and you have all these ideas and you cannot possibly do it all. You cannot go to the bank and get alone that&#8217;s going to support the marketing activities of the levels that you have. And so for all of those reasons, we want to make sure that you can actually make this business sustainable so we don&#8217;t want you to put your hard earned money or scarce time at risk. So let&#8217;s plan it on paper first. Unknown 7:00In the financials, keep them simple, keep them grounded in reality, understand them. So we want you to don&#8217;t fail out in the marketplace fail on paper first. The great part about that is you can revise it and try again. Point number two, it forces you to think to every phrase, I call it turning over every rock mentally, when you&#8217;re thinking about your business, you&#8217;re thinking about the parts of the business you love. You are not thinking about the parts of the business that you don&#8217;t love, which are equally important. They can actually be your success factors. So my plan you&#8217;re going through the entire formal planning processes, even the parts you hate turning over those rocks, touching those bases, and being Atlas. Let&#8217;s take logistics. For example, if you&#8217;ve got a couple service business, you don&#8217;t have to have a huge section on logistics. However, if you&#8217;re a moving company that packs moves and even stores household goods and business goods for people while they&#8217;re overseas for five years, logistics take on a whole new meaning turn over that rock. Is there any juice there if there&#8217;s not move on. The third reason is organize your thoughts just write things down. Unknown 8:00I work with very creative people that all these ideas are bouncing around in their head. They find that when they actually write these ideas down into one document, it frees up their creative brain. They can go on and explore new ideas. So it helps them stay organized. One place to find everything. The fourth reason I call this curb the bright shiny object dragon. A lot of the folks I work with are wildly creative, but this helps them focus on their priorities, what is actually going to make their business grow, remember, it helps them remember their ideas and act upon them. I also talked about this as parking the rest of the ideas on a shelf, you&#8217;ve got a business plan, this new idea pops into your head that&#8217;s lovely. Put it in your business plan for a future product. It doesn&#8217;t go away. You&#8217;re not going to forget about it. But you&#8217;re not going to act on it now because it&#8217;s not the highest and best use of your time. Again, it frees up your mind is the most important reason for yourself. It&#8217;s your life and your business. I want you to make the I want you to make both of them the best that they can be. So this is really all about you. Unknown 9:00The sixth reason is the reason most people put number one they want to get a bank loan their landlord their banker someone needs this business plan that&#8217;s lovely but I go back to number five do it for yourself first make sure that you&#8217;re not putting all your assets at risk. I love your number six there, Robin of needing a bank loan. because really it is the that is the reason most people come into, say, a Small Business Development Center or another economic development agency like that is because they&#8217;ve gone to the bank of the bank and said, Hey, where&#8217;s your business plan and then they then they are forced to create the business plan and really most often than not if you&#8217;re if you&#8217;re listening to us right now and you&#8217;re thinking about starting up a business Do not wait for the point in which the SBC counselor or your your banker tells you Where&#8217;s your business plan. You should really be thinking about this from the get go for all of the reasons that Robin said and more so thank you for that. Robin. At this point. We have defined a business plan we&#8217;ve talked about the differences between business plans. Unknown 10:00Lean Startup canvases. And otherwise, we&#8217;ve given ample reasons for why you should start a business plan. And now in this segment, what I&#8217;d like to do with you, Robin is to talk some about the fundamental structure of the business plan. And then we&#8217;ll probably close out that segment with what we do with the business plan once we have the business plan. So let&#8217;s get into it. What does a business plan physically and visually look like? What&#8217;s its structure? And why is it laid out in that particular order traditionally, and why do you prepare it in a different order? Because I know you do. So demystify the business planning process for small business startups. Unknown 10:40I would be happy to rate and I want to give an example here a while back, I was taking a chemistry class and it was a college level chemistry class. I&#8217;ve never taken chemistry is high school, I get into one class and I completely bombed I failed. I withdrew within one day went over to another school, another university took a chemistry class and then Unknown 11:00thing that professor told me was, he said, for those of you who don&#8217;t have a background in chemistry, this is just like following a recipe or doing anything step by step, follow through the process, and you will have your experiment and be successful. In the end. That&#8217;s the same approach to a business plan. People get very excited about business plans and very worried about them. It&#8217;s kind of like a recipe, there are certain standard parts to a business plan. And I&#8217;m going to go over those right now. And then I&#8217;ll go into more depth in the different parts. And the really important part about this is that every business plan is going to be different. There is not one process that will capture all businesses are all business plans, you&#8217;re going to have to choose the parts that are important to your business plan. The general parts though are there will always be a cover page that&#8217;s going to give some specific information. There&#8217;ll be a table of contents because you want your readers to be able to find the parts that they need. There&#8217;ll be an executive summary a company description then we&#8217;re going to get into strategy I pull strategy out different people put strategy in different places, but I like to have Unknown 12:00His own category I think is critically important, then you&#8217;re going to go over the industry and market analysis that&#8217;s going to include your target market, your market research, competitive analysis, then you&#8217;re going to talk about your products and services. Again, that&#8217;s that&#8217;s a portion that I always pull out by itself, because that is important. You&#8217;ll talk about your value statement in the intellectual property aspects that you have. Then you&#8217;ll talk about your pricing strategy. And again, that&#8217;s one section that I pull out because I want you to understand exactly what you&#8217;re charging and what it&#8217;s costing you. Robin is actually going to share with me her outline of these portions of the business plan. So I&#8217;m going to put that into the show notes for you. So as Robin is describing these, the outline of the business plan, you can actually follow along there at web and beyond cast calm. The next section I talked about is the marketing and sales plan. Again, I pulled that out specifically because I want you to know very clearly what your tactics and what your marketing budget is going to be. Next we talked about the management operations plan then finally the financials your income Unknown 13:00statements, cash flow statements and balance sheets, breakeven analysis and your personal financial statements. And then for everything else that didn&#8217;t make it into plan that you feel is important. There&#8217;s the appendix. And that&#8217;s it. So that&#8217;s the outline of the business plan. Now we&#8217;re going to look more in depth into each one of these sections. Take it away, Robin, let&#8217;s move on to the company description there. You&#8217;re going to include your name, your address, your phone number, just the facts, ma&#8217;am. Include the business location, if it&#8217;s different, or if there are multiple locations you want to talk about your classification. Are you retail or wholesale or service or what are you you&#8217;ll talk about your legal structures, assuming that all the aspects of your company, your start date, your history, if you have some or if you&#8217;re a startup, your projections, the talk about your team, your board of advisors, all that very factual information. Then the section that I love, and this is actually where I do start with clients. A lot of times rate is their strategy. This is going to include their mission, their vision, their values, their SWOT analysis, and for those of you have never done this. Why Unknown 14:00analysis that&#8217;s strengths and weaknesses, which are internal, and opportunities and threats, which are external, you have no control over. So that&#8217;s the SWOT analysis. Then you&#8217;ll talk about your goals and objectives out of three to five years, 10 years for your major goals. And you&#8217;re going to include your marketing goals later here, we&#8217;re talking about sales and time. Your executive summary is the best part of your plan is actually the last part of the plan that you do. But one did you pages no more than that. Think of it as introducing your company to someone that has never met you before? What do you want to tell them? Your mission and vision should be parts of what you&#8217;re talking to them about? give a brief history of your company. Talk about your management team? What milestones have you achieved, or will you achieve? What are your future expansion goals? Who is your target? What do you offer? Why will your idea your company work and be profitable what makes you different include some basic financial information here to just the highlights you include a lot more later on in your in your financial section. This is your plan. Unknown 15:00be brutally honest about this section. Next is your industry and market analysis for the industry analysis. How big is the industry? Next, you&#8217;re going to do industry and market analysis, what is the nays code, you can find the next code, which is the NA IC s code or, or sick code. I will put a link to the next code search tool in the show notes. So you could just check that out. And you can find your own next code from that place. Perfect. Thank you. Right. And so for some businesses that will be very relevant for some businesses, it won&#8217;t be as relevant at all, if it&#8217;s relevant. Put it in there. Is your industry growing? What&#8217;s the outlook? Is it stagnant? Is it dramatically changing? And here I talk about technology technology is impacting almost every industry on the earth today. So what is technology doing to your industry? What market share Do you expect to gain? Keep this simple you&#8217;re starting out as a small business. You do not need 3 billion customers as you&#8217;re starting out. Keep it simple. What can you logically expect to gain over what period of time Unknown 16:00How many clients do you need at that price that you want to charge given your expenses to make a profit? And does that result seem reasonable? Are there any regulatory restrictions or trends that are negative? That&#8217;s the type of thing you have to look at your industry analysis next year market analysis target market, you will hear a lot about target market and it&#8217;s very, very important. Who are they? Who are the people that will be your customers? Where do they hang out? What are the demographics, what are their ages, their gender, their household income, their education level where they&#8217;re psycho graphics? Do they like social media? Do they prefer flyers? All types of things we&#8217;re going to talk about with your target market, but most specifically, where do they hang out? How are you going to find them? One thing that I want people to typically add in their business plan are techno graphics and techno graphics is basically how technologically savvy are those people because it really makes a difference on the internet. how sophisticated people are going to be with technology as it relates to your product, even if your product has not Unknown 17:00Nothing to do with technology, because that&#8217;s going to be how you get in front of them. As you were talking about Robin, I love that. I&#8217;ve never heard that phrase. And I am going to include that for now on with your permission. I love it. You got to find them. So where are they? And how savvy are they and how are you going to reach them and where they comfortable? We talked a lot about niche a target niche or niche market. I wanted to be niche but not to niches sort of like Goldilocks, you want the just right niche? Are there enough buyers in your niche? Is it big enough for you to create your business? That&#8217;s what we&#8217;re talking about. We&#8217;ll talk about market research include any primary or original research, those are focus groups and surveys and speaking with others, and secondary research generated by others articles, trade journals, the Bureau of Labor and stats, that type of research so include both primary and secondary research and then a competitive analysis. Who are your competitors? I want you to find the closest competitor to you. Who are they? How are you going to beat them and a lot of times today, people can collaborate with our competitors if the niche is locked. Unknown 18:00off, you might have just a little bit different offering and, and collaborate with some of your competitors. Some competitors you will never be able to collaborate with the answer will live with you and you&#8217;ll have to decide which approach you&#8217;re going to take. When you&#8217;re when you&#8217;re thinking about competitive analysis. You should also probably think about marketing alliances because many times your competitors are people who don&#8217;t, who may serve the same population, but who will like you and not like them or vice versa. Be prepared for the fact that you can&#8217;t help everybody and not everybody will like you. So you can actually work with your competitors as marketing Alliance partners, where you market together to the same group of people. I see this all the time with graphic designers, for example. So graphic designers have styles and personalities that don&#8217;t mesh with everybody. So if you work together as graphic designers, you can actually both help one another by reducing your overall marketing costs your marketing advertising dollars and Unknown 19:00Make more business, right? Get more business by the fact that you&#8217;re working together to communicate out to the same audience. So don&#8217;t think about this as a scarcity mindset, you really need to think about this as how can we how can we have an abundance mindset that there&#8217;s more than a business for both of us for all of us if we work together? That&#8217;s an awesome concept. Right? I agree with you, 100%. Next, we have products and services. This is the value statement I talked about before your USP unique selling proposition Why are you better what&#8217;s your competitive advantage, spell it out, you talked about it all throughout your plan and bits and pieces now put it all together your products and services we want here your names and descriptions, what are your products is what are their features and benefits include some pictures include some promotions and you can also put your promotions and marketing material in the appendix. If it&#8217;s too bulky to put here in the ongoing research and development that you have talked about here any innovative new products that are coming out Unknown 20:00down the road. I also like to include the intellectual property aspects here. If you have any way to protect your products, please do so are there any trademarks, service marks, trade, secret patent, anything like that, that you can arm secure to protect your product pricing strategy? Again, I like this section all by itself to make sure it does not get asked what are you charging? And why are you taking a high price strategy, a low price strategy or a moderate pricing strategy? What perceived value does this lend to your company your products and services. There are some companies who are absolutely high end high value companies. There are other companies that are going to compete more on volume and have a lower price here. I always talk about Nordstrom and Walmart. I can buy a dress or a suit at both companies. I&#8217;m going to pay different price point at each company. I&#8217;ll have a different shopping experience these at each company. If I go online, look at their websites, two different experiences. I can tell you that both companies will make money Unknown 21:00Which strategy Are you going to follow? And this? This absolutely goes into your branding. How will you make a profit? That&#8217;s what you&#8217;re really talking about here? And do you have a free offering are using a freemium model where you&#8217;re going to bring something, offer something for free with the enticement of bringing this person into your marketing plan? marketing sales plans, this is really your promotional and sales strategy. You&#8217;ve already decided your company strategy, your mission, your vision, all the other information, but how are you actually going to sell your product here? We talked a lot about tactics. Let&#8217;s just go through a few of them a website by the way, please have a website there are way you probably know the number much more strongly than I do. But two thirds of the companies in the United States don&#8217;t have websites. Is that accurate? It&#8217;s it&#8217;s currently 60%, 60% Unknown 21:44of small businesses in the US do not have a website and I find that shocking people will rely on Facebook and other social media platforms and that&#8217;s part of the the marketing strategy but I encourage you to have a website also are you getting Unknown 22:00is a blog a blog is really social media but I break it out and how about your social media platforms all the platforms you&#8217;re going to use now or in the future include them here. I&#8217;m also including podcasts here and videos. We have an email newsletter and I really strongly encourage people to have newsletters. Every time I talk about this CMOS, I Oh, I never open newsletters and newsletters are no longer effective. It&#8217;s actually not true. When I ran the nonprofit no matter what my open rate was. Every time I put out my newsletter, we had calls for appointments, we had calls for people to take our seminars, there was activity every time we put out our newsletter, so newsletter can be very valuable. Do you have any free lead ins? You have any white papers, a free console resources page, what are you offering on your website or in your social media platforms for free always include networking. Talk about your referral network, this is your referral partners. And by the way, referrals are two way street. You can&#8217;t just assume that somebody&#8217;s going to refer to you all the time and you never refer back to them. So make sure you&#8217;ve got a two way referral relationship. You can do that. Unknown 23:00Working one on one. You can go to lunches and coffees and you can do online networking. I have a university that does online networking is one of my favorite activities. I meet people from all over the world through this online networking platform. You can have video meetings, you can go to chamber meetings, all types of networking, and then the one on one follow ups from other networking events. Make sure when you go networking and you meet someone that you follow up with them. I love the salespeople who said every lead that followed up on a sale last we&#8217;d be a speaker, you can be a paid speaker. Otherwise be strategic about your time. Are you going to put some books out some paid books or print books or ebooks and don&#8217;t forget phone calls. I now live in a more rural part of the country in the urban part of the country where I live before people didn&#8217;t pick up the phone and call as much here telephone is the primary way to contact people. So figuring out all the different methods and which one works best for you. Are you going to offer rewards will you put ads out we use the newspaper will use social media ads. There are so many marketing tactics but that&#8217;s just scratching. Unknown 24:00The service and that&#8217;s where you want to put your marketing tactics in your business plan. And other part of this is your marketing budget. What do you need to spend by when to achieve your marketing results. If this figure is too low or too high, go back and adjust your tactics. I can give you an example of a person who started a brick and mortar and spent $30,000 in marketing and had almost nothing to show for it at the end of six months. That was my heart hurt for this person, but she just overspend on her marketing and didn&#8217;t use good tactics. So there are lots of ways to spend your marketing dollars, make sure that you&#8217;re optimizing your marketing dollars. Next, we talk about management and your operations plan. Look at your distribution, your location or your bricks and mortar. Are you going to be online? Do you have logistics aspects would you have for floor plans? This would be like a yoga studio that was opening in a town and they had to coordinate all of the pieces of the build out and setting up the yoga studio and hiring their Yogi&#8217;s and all that fun stuff. Absolutely. Unknown 25:00Yes, and that&#8217;s an important part. For a lot of businesses. If you&#8217;re a solo printer from a home based office, it&#8217;s not going to be as important. So again, this is a great example of where some of these aspects will make it into your plan. Some will not. What are your operating regulations? Is there anything specific to your industry? Are there any licenses or regulations or zoning or fees that you have to look at any special taxes, then look at your HR human resources include your org chart here, your organizational chart, even if it only includes one person for now, that will clearly show you all the different tasks that you&#8217;re doing, how many hats are you&#8217;re wearing. I also like to include your risks and challenges and future plans, spell them out here, then become to your financials. If you&#8217;re a startup, I like you to include a startup list. What are you paying for is you&#8217;re starting a company list all the expenses for your professional expenses, you might have some research and development you may be paying someone to create your legal entity. You may be paying for trademarks, you may be getting some insurance, putting in telephones, whatever your startup expenses are, then as you Unknown 26:00Move forward, I&#8217;d like your income and expense statement for that that&#8217;s money flowing into your company and money leaving your company and break it into as much detail as you need to have, I want you to have a very clear picture at the end of each month, whether you&#8217;re in the black, or if you&#8217;re in the red, if you&#8217;re in the red, you&#8217;ve spent more that month, then you&#8217;ve had money coming in, and there&#8217;s no cash that you can go to to make up that gap. So you need to know when that&#8217;s going to happen so that you can get alone or put some kind of financing in place to turn that red magically into black. We talked about your balance sheet. That&#8217;s the stuff that you have. So do you have plans and equipment? Do you have a building a lot of our companies do not have robust balance sheets because they&#8217;re very lean their home based businesses and they don&#8217;t have a lot of inventory. So it will depend again on your business. But you always want to have a picture of your stuff and that&#8217;s the balance sheet. Your income and expense statement will be a point in time so for example, you might want to create your your income statement per quarter. Unknown 27:00for six months, you can compare. If you use a program like QuickBooks, you can can probably compare your income statement. Maybe I&#8217;ll just pick a month, march of year, why over march of the prior year, and that will give you historic look back as you grow your business, then make sure you include your breakeven analysis and your personal financial statements specifically if you&#8217;re going for a bank loan. And often for leasehold, we&#8217;re going to use a very simple example let&#8217;s say that you&#8217;re making handbags or persists and you&#8217;re going to sell your purses for $10 is going to cost you $7 to produce those verses. If you subtract the seven from 10, your profit would be $3 per unit per purse. Let&#8217;s just say that you had fixed expenses of $300 per month. These are not actually realistic figures, but they&#8217;re easy for math. So if you were to take that $3 profit per unit that you sell divided into the 300, you would have to sell 100 units each month just to break even to pay your fixed expenses in that scenario. Unknown 28:00At that point, you better really enjoy, make it 100% per month, because there&#8217;s no profit. So you&#8217;d have to add your profit on to that, and then divide that $3 into the profit that you want to make. So that&#8217;s just a very simplistic way to look at your breakeven analysis. There are lots of awesome calculators out there online that you can use to plug in the numbers and calculation breakeven in the appendix you&#8217;re going to include things that need to be included in your business plan, but they&#8217;re not pertinent to the main body that will be perhaps your floor plan, always the resumes of your top key personnel go in here. And that&#8217;s it. Fantastic. So So you&#8217;ve given us a detailed look into the business plan parts and its construction. And so at this point, once a business plan is as the lyrics go to the song Signed, Sealed, Delivered, it&#8217;s yours. What do you do after all those long hours of working on it? What What do you do with the business plan? How often do you look at it? How often do you update it and and I know that some people say, you know, you should remember Unknown 29:00Right it every year, every 10 years, there&#8217;s all kinds of Unknown 29:04advice out there. What&#8217;s the life of a business plan look like. It&#8217;s really a living document. You mentioned that before. And it truly is the person who&#8217;s going to make their business plan to spend all this time on it, and then turn it into our never look at it. Again, that&#8217;s not the approach that you should take. I really believe that you need to look at your business plan. And it really depends on the stage you are with your business, some people who want to look at it every year. And I think that&#8217;s a really great approach. As you&#8217;re starting out though, I&#8217;d like to have you look at it just review it monthly in the beginning and then you might progress a quarterly and then I believe that you always need at least an annual review but when something comes up and a problem occurs bank you go right back to your business plan. With that. That takes us to our final segment of the show which is best tool of the Week. This week. I have a tool for everybody called n loop and n loop is a business planning software. So what you do with this business plans Unknown 30:00Software is that you&#8217;re able to open up an account online, you could try it for free, there&#8217;s a, there&#8217;s a fee associated with it if you plan to, you know, go forward with it, but it allows you to share it with users. And you can create real time performance metrics. So you can score yourself against these particular metrics. You could put text in and customize that text, it does financials, that automatic automatically generates financial reports. It&#8217;s just a really great tool for being able to give you an understanding of your business plan and help produce the business plan and even has like a pass fail reporting functionality so that it can you can look at critical issues and identify those and figure out whether or not this is actually going to work for you. And I really liked the tool. It&#8217;s just it&#8217;s a simple tool with a lot of stuff working under the hood, and I think that&#8217;s really useful. One quick runner up though, is actually on the SBA website, the Small Business Administration. If you go to sba.org, they have a business planning tool and their financial tools. Unknown 31:00is actually really good for free tool. It&#8217;s really great for being able to put together your financials. So I put a link to both end loop and the SBA business plan tool in the show notes, I put a couple of honorable mentions in there as well, so you can check out those. And that brings me to the closing of this episode and our time together. Robin, thank you so much for being here on the show with us. Ray. Thank you for inviting me. It&#8217;s been a pleasure and an honor to be on your show. Absolutely. How can people get in touch with you after the show? if they have questions? The very best way is to go to my website which is startup to growth calm and that&#8217;s s ta RT up to G r o w. t h.com. There&#8217;s a Contact link there. You can also email me at Robin at startup to grow. com. I would love to hear from you. If you have any questions. Please reach out wonderful great so people can go to start up to growth.com and reach out to Robin or Robin at startup to growth calm and reach out to her if you have any questions. Unknown 32:00With that before we close out this cast if you have a comment or question, please feel free to visit the podcast page at web and beyond cast.com. And if you want to send a direct message to us, click on the Contact button on the website. There. You can ask a question suggest a topic for a future episode and we can get back in touch with you if necessary. Also, if you are able to help us out, please leave a rating or review on Apple podcast iTunes or Stitcher on your phone or desktop. This helps us know how we&#8217;re doing and it encourages apple and the other podcast directories to display web and beyond cast to more listeners. So thank you. Thank you for listening to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond. I&#8217;m your host racing Smith. Until next time, here&#8217;s to your small business success on the web and beyond.

Welcome to Season 1, Episode 011, of Web and BeyondCast, &#8220;GDPR for Small Business.&#8221; (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://webandbeyondcast.com/011 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) According to Verizon’s 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report, “58% of malware attack victims are categorized as small businesses.” And, in the 2017 Cybercrime Report by Cybersecurity Ventures, they note that “cybercrime damages will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021.” It’s with this general risk in mind that the European Union started the process of updating its already-existing Data Protection Directive from 1995, and enacted the General Data Protection Regulation. Or, as some of you might have heard it as its acronym, GDPR. I’ll call it GDPR for the rest of this episode. I’ve gotten many questions about this topic, so in today’s episode, I’m going to do a deep-dive into: What is GDPR? Who Does GDPR Apply to? What Are the Key Provisions of GDPR for Small Business? What Actions Should You Take To Be and Stay GDPR-Compliant? Disclaimer: None of this should be taken as legal advice. I’m trying to give an explanation of a highly complex, evolving extraterritorial law, and additional laws, and if you have specific questions about your situation and the laws that impact your business, you should seek licensed legal counsel in your jurisdiction. If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. In this Cast &#124; GDPR for Small Business Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Show Notes &#124; GDPR for Small Business Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Key Terminology: Subject &#8211; a living, natural person (so corporate/business entities, governments or anything other than a living human being don’t count under GDPR) Personal Data &#8211; any data that can identify a subject directly or indirectly, so some common forms of Personal Data are a living person’s name, address, phone number, date of birth, and tax identification number. But, it encompasses any data that fits this category. Anonymous data does not apply. Personal Sensitive Data, or Sensitive Personal Data &#8211; a class of Personal Data, that should be subjected to a higher level of protection, includes “data consisting of racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, genetic data, biometric data, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person&#8217;s sex life or sexual orientation.” Data Controller &#8211; a person or entity “which&#8230;determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data” Data Processor &#8211; a person or entity which processes personal data on behalf of a Data Controller Key Provisions: Data security versus Data Privacy &#8211; chain link fence versus a 10’ solid brick wall. GDPR applies to customers and employees of your business. Right to Consent &#8230;for the data you collect about your customers and employees. This includes access to that data. Right of Access &#8230;to the data about you. Right to Portability &#8230;exportable and in a useable format. Right to “Rectification” &#8230;fix inaccurate data or request data not be used any longer. Right to Erasure &#8230;aka right to be forgotten &#8230;erasure of subject’s data upon request. All of these aforementioned requests from data subjects are to be responded within 30 days and you cannot charge them for it&#8211;it must be free-of-charge. Right to be Informed &#8230;in the event of a data breach, that “is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons, the controller shall communicate the personal data breach to the data subject without undue delay.” (Source) For more on the rights of data subjects, see: Chapter 9: Rights of data subjects – Unlocking the EU General Data Protection Regulation Rights of data subjects &#8211; GDPR What Actions Should You Take To Comply and Stay Compliant with GDPR for Small Business? Assign a Data Protection Officer (DPO) (someone dedicated to knowing GDPR and focused on GDPR compliance on a day-to-day basis). Start listing all systems that house data about your customers and employees, and include what data vendors also hold of your customers and employees. You must be able to share that with identified subjects and legal authorities upon request. You’re a data controller (DC) (most likely if you’re the business) and you need to make a list of all data processors (DP); get an agreement with each one to make sure you have technical capabilities and business processes, or if no agreement, at least know how the business processes work in the event someone requests data erasure or access, or an incident occurs. This information is usually in the Privacy Policy or Terms of Use/Service on a data processor’s website. Understand how you transfer data between you and third parties (processors, vendors, etc.) (If that data is crossing international borders, make sure to look at Privacy Shield Framework). Formalize this information in a Privacy Policy, Disclaimer and/or Terms of Use/Service on your Web properties where subjects can see it. Make a list of all the types of data (literally, a list of all the field names that are personal data (PD)) in your systems. Can automated data collected be erased? Edited if inaccurate? Ported/exported (data portability) in a useable format to a subject? Are you getting permission for marketing programs? Can you provide authorities documentation of user opt-ins? (No pre-checked opt-ins. Past subscribers who didn’t opt-in must be qualified. Subscribers should be able to unsubscribe easily, too.) Audit your data security controls in place. What do you need to be more secure? Then, create a data protection, awareness and education program for employees, vendors, and customers. Encrypt your website data (SSL/TLS encryption) and that of any data processors. According to Intersoft Consulting’s guide on GDPR, Encryption of personal data has additional benefits for controllers and/or order processors. For example, the loss of a state of the art encrypted mobile storage medium which holds personal data is not necessarily considered a data breach, which must be reported to the data protection authorities. In addition, if there is a data breach, the authorities must positively consider the use of encryption in their decision on whether and what amount a fine is imposed as per Art. 83(2)(c) of the GDPR. Also note, “92.4% of malware is delivered via email,” according to Verizon’s 2018 DBIR. Make sure you are doing all you can to mitigate malware, phishing and other attacks targeted at your email. Create a data breach and crisis response plan. (Know what you are going to do in the 72 hours from the time of the breach, including reporting to authorities within those 72 hours.) Make a clear list of&#8230;     (1) what to do in the event of a data breach, and     (2) who to contact and how you will contact them? Create a data retention policy for all data&#8230;on all devices and paper records in the business. Are you collecting, and sharing with third parties, only what you need? And, for how long? Update your documentation for employees and audit that you are actually deleting personal data and sensitive personal data you don’t need on a regular basis. Best Tool of the Week &#124; GDPR for Small Business WP GDPR Compliance plugin (free) Other WordPress GDPR compliance plugins Raw Text Transcript &#124; GDPR for Small Business Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360c8c43" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360c8c43" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360c8c43" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360c8c43" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Voiceover Artists 0:00 Welcome to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond with your host Ray Sidney-Smith. Ray Sidney-Smith 0:10 Hello there small business owners, entrepreneurs and community Welcome to season one episode 11 of web and beyond cast. According to Verizon&#8217;s 2018 data breach investigations report, 58% of malware attack victims are categorized as small businesses. And then the 2017 cyber crime report by cyber security ventures. They note that cyber crime damages will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021. So it&#8217;s with this general risk in mind that the European Union started the process of updating its already existing Data Protection Directive from 1995 and enacted the general data protection regulation. Or as some of you might have heard it as its acronym, GDPR. I&#8217;ll call it GDPR for the rest of this episode, so that you have some perspective, the timeline for this actually started back in 2016, subsequent to the 1995 Data Protection Directive. So in May of 2016, the regulation entered into force, it&#8217;s not until May 25, 2018, that has provisions became directly applicable in all member states, Member States being all of the jurisdictions within the European Union. That is, they gave us all two years after the regulation went into force and effect. Finally, as of July 20, 2018, GDPR became valid in the European Economic Area or the EEA countries which include Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. So here we are now today in October, and I get many questions about GDPR. So in today&#8217;s episode, I&#8217;m going to do a deep dive into what is GDPR? Who does GDPR apply to? Also what are GDPR key provisions for small businesses? And finally, what actions should use take to be and stay GDPR compliant? First, none of this should be taken as legal advice. I&#8217;m trying to give an explanation of a highly complex evolving extraterritorial law and additional laws. And if you have specific questions about your situation, and the laws that impact your business, you should seek licensed legal counsel in your jurisdiction. Next, I&#8217;d like to start with why should you care? because in essence, this law that is supposed to be for EU citizens? Why should it matter to you? Well, there are actually several reasons that I&#8217;d like to go over with you. In essence, data privacy and security are very scary topics to a lot of people. And we want to think about this from the consumer perspective. So you as a consumer, you want data privacy and security. People want it to people around you want it to. And thankfully, when you do show strong data, privacy and security for your customers that builds trust, and with trust, you get a competitive advantage. And so many businesses are ignoring GDPR today, the United States that putting your GDPR compliance upfront can really work to your advantage from even a marketing perspective. Next, it&#8217;s just the right thing to do. As I said before, do you want your data private and secure? Of course, you do you want Microsoft and Google and Apple and all the other companies that you come into contact with throughout your day, whether that be financially or otherwise, to keep your data private and secure as you plan it to be? Why shouldn&#8217;t you keep others data private and secure than as well. Finally, it makes your own systems more private and secure so that you actually have less risk with your own technology and business data. quoting from a USA Today article. cyber threat is huge for small businesses written by the inimitable Steve Strauss according to ups, capital cyber attacks costs small business between $84,100 and $148,000, 60% of small businesses go out of business within six months of an attack. 90% of small businesses don&#8217;t use any data protection at all for company and customer information. Almost two thirds of all cyber attacks are now directed at small business. I sincerely urge you to not just listen to this episode, but to tell all your colleagues and small business friends that they need to pay attention. There&#8217;s no doubt in my mind that this will sting many businesses in the coming future. So with that, I&#8217;m hoping this episode will help get you started on the road to GDPR compliance. So let&#8217;s get into what GDPR actually is, and its key provisions that matter to your business and understanding GDPR it&#8217;s really important for us to understand some terminology. So I&#8217;m going to go over the five major terms that I&#8217;ll be using throughout the episode that will be useful to you and understanding how to become GDPR compliant. First and foremost is the word subject or data subject. A subject is a living natural person. So corporate business entities, governments or any other thing doesn&#8217;t count under GDPR. Next up personal data. personal data is any data that can identify a subject directly or indirectly. So some common forms of personal data are living persons name, address, phone number, date of birth, and say Tax Identification Number, but it encompasses any data that fits into this category. Anonymous data does not apply next, personal sensitive data or sensitive personal data, I&#8217;ve seen it listed both ways sensitive personal data is a class of personal data that should be subjected to a higher level of protection, which includes, and I&#8217;m quoting here from the regulation data consisting of racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, genetic data, biometric data, data concerning health, or data concerning a person&#8217;s sex life or sexual orientation and quote, a data controller, a data controller is a person or entity which determines the purposes or means of the processing of personal data. In essence, a data controller is likely you the business or the business owner. And finally, is the data processor. And a data processor is a person or entity which processes personal data on behalf of the data controller. So typically, this is going to be a vendor or a software provider on the internet that provides data processing on your behalf. But it doesn&#8217;t have to necessarily be on the internet for it to apply in terms of GDPR. So for example, your accountant might use accounting software, they are considered a data processor, and you were considered the data controller, I think it&#8217;s important here to stop and talk a little bit about data secure, and data privacy here, so that you have some understanding about what these terms are, I use an analogy of a chain link fence, a curtain and a 10 foot solid brick wall. Okay, here we go. So data security is the idea of taking a plot of land and putting a chain link fence around that piece of property. So with a chain link fence, you have security, the property is safe from people say, getting in, because there&#8217;s the fence around it. If we go over to now, data privacy, we could think about erecting a set of curtains around the piece of property, right, just big, tall curtains, and we could set up curtains that run the entire perimeter of the property. But it doesn&#8217;t provide any data security, anyone can walk through the curtains and walk directly onto the property. So it&#8217;s giving you data privacy, but not security. And then finally, we have the 10 foot solid brick wall, a 10 foot solid brick wall is going to not only give you security, no one&#8217;s going to be able to penetrate the solid brick wall. But now we also get privacy because people can&#8217;t actually see in reasonably into the property. This helps you understand the difference between data security and data privacy. And we want both we want the 10 foot solid brick wall GDPR gives these rights to EU citizens as well as UK citizens. So anyone who is a UK or EU citizen that is utilizing your website and or your services, in essence, is covered by GDPR. So it doesn&#8217;t matter where they are. It just matters that they are EU or UK citizens. So who does GDPR apply to GDPR applies to your customers and employees. And really anyone who visits your website and collects data who happens to be an EU or UK citizen, it doesn&#8217;t apply to them only when they&#8217;re in the EU or in the UK. So at any given time, your website or your data systems could be collecting data about EU and UK citizens. And therefore you need to universally apply GDPR and stay compliant so that you don&#8217;t get bitten. Unbeknownst to you. I&#8217;d also add that going back to my PowerPoints about people want it, I think it&#8217;s really important for you to do this for all of your business customers and employees. It shouldn&#8217;t matter that they&#8217;re EU or UK citizens. And I&#8217;ll talk about that at the end GDPR gives certain rights to the subject. And what the GDPR says is that these rights are inherent, they are given to you as a birthright. So data privacy and data security are human rights. And so those human rights are merely being identified within GDPR, similar to the way that in our United States Constitution, our rights are inalienable, but they are outlined there in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, I&#8217;m going to identify six of the major rights that really affect you as a business owner, there are additional rights data subjects, and I put links to those in the show notes. So let&#8217;s go through these one by one. First up is the right to consent, that is for the data you collect about your customers and employees. And you should include access to that data, which is right number to the right of access to the data about your subjects. So a subject has a right to access to their data, they not only have it right have access to their data, but number three is a right to portability. That is, they should be able to ask you that is request from you their data to be exported, and they should be able to receive it in a usable format. That is, it can&#8217;t just be gobbledygook, you need to be able to give it to them in a format that they can use elsewhere number for a right to rectification. If a data subject comes to you, and recognizes that there is inactive data about them on your systems, they have a right to ask you to fix that inaccurate data or request data not be used any longer. And that brings us to number five, the right to a ratio. It&#8217;s also called the right to be forgotten, and a subject can ask for the ratio of their data upon request. All of these aforementioned requests from data subjects are to be responded within 30 days, and you cannot charge them for it, it must be free of charge. And finally, six the right to be informed in the event of a data breach. That is your data systems in some way, shape, or form have compromised their data, that quote is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons, the controller shall communicate the personal data breach to the data subject without undue delay. And quote, those are the six kind of fundamental rights that have been outlined within GDPR and you should become fairly familiar with them going forward. Now that I&#8217;ve covered the key provisions and who GDPR applies to, I do want to cover 10 things that you as a business owner can do today to get started in becoming GDPR compliant and staying GDPR compliant. Because GDPR compliance isn&#8217;t just checking off a couple of boxes, and then you&#8217;re done. And you can just walk away from it, you really do need to be vigilant. This is requiring all of us business owners to start implementing GDPR in the ways in which we can throughout our business. Again, like I said, this is going to make all of us stronger. Together, I&#8217;ve written out this checklist on the podcast show notes, so you can feel free to go over there and copy and paste this for later. So you don&#8217;t need to scribble down all these notes as I&#8217;m giving them to you. Number one, assign a data protection officer or dp, oh, this is either someone in your business or someone that you hire outside. as a consultant who&#8217;s dedicated to knowing GDPR and especially focused on GDPR compliance. on a day to day basis, you need to have a data protection officer so that you can have someone who can be in charge of focusing on all of the various moving parts that there are as it relates to GDPR compliance. Number two, start listing all systems that house data about your customers and employees and include what data vendors also hold on your customers and employees, you must be able to share that with identified subjects and legal authorities upon request. Number three, most likely, if you&#8217;re the business owner, you&#8217;re the data controller or the DC and you need to make a list of all data processors or DPS, you need to get an agreement with each one of them to make sure you have technical capabilities and business processes in place. And if there&#8217;s no agreement, at least know how the business processes work. In the event someone requests data ratio, access or correction or if a data incident occurs like a data breach. This information is usually in the privacy policy or Terms of Use and or service on the data processors website. Number four, understand how you transfer data between you and third parties, that is processes, vendors, etc. If that data crosses international borders, make sure to look at the Privacy Shield framework and I put a link to this in the show notes, you&#8217;ll need to make sure that you get self certified through the Privacy Shield framework, formalize this information in a privacy policy disclaimer, and or Terms of Use and or service on your website properties where subjects can see it. Number five, make a list of all the types of data literally a list of all the field names that are personal data in your systems. Number six, can automated data collected be erased? Can it be edited? If it&#8217;s an accurate, can it be ported and or exported in a usable format to a data subject? Number seven? Are you getting permission for marketing programs? Can you provide authorities documentation of user opt ins that is no pre checked option boxes are allowed. You need to have them affirmatively check those boxes so that you can have a record that a person has desired to be on your marketing lists. Past subscribers who didn&#8217;t opt in must be qualified subscribers should be able to unsubscribe easily as well. So you need to go back to all of your email and figure that all out. Number eight, audit your data security controls that you have in place for the business, what do you need to be more secure than create a data protection awareness and education program for employees, vendors and customers. I know this can sound daunting, but it&#8217;s as easy as just taking basic data protection, awareness and education to the people who are coming into contact with personal data. If you need have someone on the outside, who&#8217;s more familiar with data protection, data security, data privacy and have them come in and talk to your employees, vendors and customers. It&#8217;s going to make you all more secure. One really easy thing you can do is encrypt your website data that is using an SSL certificate on your website. Using TMS encryption. You can talk to your website host website, domain registrar or otherwise to start the process and that have any data processors for example, if you are connected to a service on your website, you want to make sure that they&#8217;re also SSL encrypted. According to interest soft consulting guide on GDPR, which is linked in the show notes. Quote, encryption of personal data has additional benefits for controllers and or order processors. For example, the loss of a state of the art encrypted mobile storage medium, which holds personal data is not necessarily considered data breach, which must be reported to the data protection authorities. In addition, if there is a data breach the authority specific positively consider the use of encryption and the decision on whether and what amount of fine is imposed as per article at three to see of the GDPR. I&#8217;d also like to make a point here that the GDPR has an upper fine of 20 million euros. OK, so the maximum fine is basically enough to put you out of business. So this is not to be played with also note 92.4% of malware is delivered via email according to horizons that that data breach inspection report that I mentioned at the top of the show, make sure you are doing all you can to mitigate malware, fishing and other attacks that are targeted at your and your employees. Email. Number nine, create a data breach and Crisis Response Plan. Know what you&#8217;re going to do in the 72 hours from the time of the breach, including reporting to authorities within those 72 hours, make a clear list of one what to do in the event of a data breach and to who to contact and how you will contact them. These need to be clear plane instructions, you know, printed on paper so that you are readily and capable of following those instructions. Because emotions are high, it&#8217;s usually chaotic, and you want to be able to have an appropriate response plan in place number 10. And finally, create a data retention policy for all data that is on all devices, including paper records in the business paper does count in GDPR, are you collecting and sharing with third parties only what you need and for how long are you collecting them, update your documentation for employees and audit that you are actually deleting personal data and sensitive personal data you don&#8217;t need on a regular basis, the frequency is up to you, you need to determine your own risk. And again, you should talk to your licensed legal counsel for the most appropriate advice for your business. But this doesn&#8217;t end here. GDPR is the start. California recently enacted Bill 8375, the California consumer Privacy Act of 2018, and Colorado&#8217;s governor signed into law on May 29, the protections for consumer data privacy act, and it went into effect on September 1, 2018. So Californians and Coloradans now have different laws that are impacting the way in which you should be processing their personal data, more laws will come and Congress or the Supreme Court of the United States will need to act so that businesses across the state and around the world don&#8217;t have to abide by hundreds of different jurisdictions laws. And that brings us to the best tool of the week for this week I wanted to give you have a tool that will hopefully make GDPR compliance a wee bit easier and if you are running a WordPress website, which most small businesses do and if you don&#8217;t, I apologize contact me and maybe I have some tools in my my bookmarks that can help you out if you are not on WordPress, but the tool I&#8217;m going to be talking about this week is called WP GDPR compliance plugin. And what this is, is a free plugin that&#8217;s available in the WordPress directory just in your WordPress dashboard, click on plugins add new type in WP space GDPR space compliance. And again, there&#8217;s a link to this in the show notes. And what it does is it gives you a whole host of tools that assist you as a website or an e commerce website owner to comply with the data protection regulation. Okay, so you can go through and follow it. And it brings you almost into compliance across the board for your website. So it can make becoming GDPR at least easier across a whole series of measures. Check it out. There are other WordPress GDPR compliance logins and I put a link to that in the show notes so you can check that out. I hope that makes making at least your website a little bit more GDPR friendly and hopefully compliant in the future and that&#8217;ll help the whole process move forward. This won&#8217;t be the last time we&#8217;re talking about data privacy and protection here on weapon beyond cast but you have your work ahead of you right now. From the list of items I detailed again that lists available there at weapon beyond cast.com forward slash 011011 is the episode number so weapon beyond cast.com forward slash 011 there Feel free to leave comments or questions there on the podcast episode page you can click on the Contact button on the podcast website there you can ask a direct question with us suggest a topic you&#8217;d like web and beyond cast to cover in a future episode as well if you feel so inclined please leave a rating a review on Apple podcast and or iTunes or Stitcher this helps us know how we&#8217;re doing and it encourages apple and other podcast directories to display weapon beyond cast to more listeners so it increases our listening community so thank you and thanks for listening to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing all the web and beyond I&#8217;m your host Ray Sidney-Smith until next time, here&#8217;s to your small business success on the web and beyond.

Welcome to Season 1, Episode 010, of Web and BeyondCast. On this cast, we will be discussing marketing video production&#8211;what it takes to get the marketing videos you need for your business created. And, to do that, I&#8217;ve brought in my go-to expert on video production, Sharon Sobel of Picture This Video. We are going to learn about what questions you should ask when starting a video project, who you&#8217;re hiring, and what platforms you should use to get the word out there about your videos once they&#8217;re made&#8230;and much more. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://webandbeyondcast.com/010 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Sharon Sobel, of Picture This Video, has been producing video projects for business clients for over 15 years.  Having evolved from tape to DVD, to online delivery, her experience and varied skills help you rest assured you are getting someone knowledgeable and experienced in all facets of production, so she’s able to work with you to produce something within your budget, and that meets your marketing video needs. &#160; Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. PictureThis Video - Sharon Sobel - Web and BeyondCast - Episode 010 - Marketing Video Production PowerPoint presentation for listeners to download Mobile Video Tripods (on Amazon) Lavalier microphone for smartphones/tablets (available as single or double microphone version) &#160; Videographer &#8211; camera work and possibly primary audio (make sure they know) Video Editor &#8211; may also be your videographer if they have the skill sets; takes the raw video and your script and edits it to the final video Video Producer &#8211; liaison between client and other video professionals roles executing the project &#160; Microsoft Word, Google Docs or LibreOffice Writer &#160; YouTube Vimeo YouTube Live Facebook Live Periscope / Twitter Instagram (15 seconds of video at a time in Stories; ~60 seconds for posts) Instagram’s IGTV (vertical only; one-hour time limit) &#160; Best Tool of the Week (Ray) Ripl (Sharon) RockNRoller Cart &#160; Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360cbe7c" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360cbe7c" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360cbe7c" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360cbe7c" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Voiceover Artists 0:00 Welcome to web and beyond cast were small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond with your host Ray Sidney-Smith. Ray Sidney-Smith 0:11 Hello there small business owners, entrepreneurs and community Welcome to Episode 10 of Web and BeyondCast. I&#8217;m Ray Sidney-Smith and we are going to be talking today about video marketing in kind of a different way than we typically do. We&#8217;re going to flip it on its head and actually talk about video marketing from the production side, we&#8217;re going to talk about how to actually get the fundamentals of production getting video prepared for how do you plan out a video, how do you do scripting? How do you get this shooting right for video footage and using some of the tools for getting the video prepared. And when you need to hire a professional. I mean, so many times, there comes a point where you decide, okay, I&#8217;m going to do video, I&#8217;m going to make video part of my business marketing strategy. And then it doesn&#8217;t happen, it doesn&#8217;t materialize. And that&#8217;s when maybe a professional needs to be brought in. And that&#8217;s why today I have brought on the show with me, Sharon Sobel. She is the owner of picture this video and has been producing video projects for business clients for over 15 years, having evolved from tape to DVD to online delivery, her experience and varied skills help her clients Rest assured they&#8217;re getting someone knowledgeable and experienced in all facets of production. So she&#8217;s able to work with them to produce something within their budget. And that meets their video needs. I know Sharon from Alexandria, Virginia, where she has been a bedrock of the Alexandria small business community. And so it&#8217;s always a pleasure to be with and around Sharon. And so welcome to the show. Sharon. Sharon Sobel 1:55 Thank you. Ray Sidney-Smith 1:57 So we&#8217;re going to talk today about preparing and planning four, and all the various meat and potatoes of actually taking recording video, and that&#8217;s your specialty. And so I wanted to for you to just give us a little bit about what I didn&#8217;t introduce about you in the show. What what&#8217;s a little bit about your background, what got you into video, and why do you still do it today for businesses. Sharon Sobel 2:20 I actually got interested in video in high school, I took a TV video production class and found that was my calling. That&#8217;s exactly what I wanted to do with my life. And so I got a degree from Radford University and I had an internship during that college time at a news affiliate and internships are great, you should always learn something from internships. And what I learned was, I did not want to do news. So that was valuable. I didn&#8217;t know exactly where I wanted to work. But I knew it was not news. And even No, I, I loved all of the parts of making a video product. I just didn&#8217;t like news stories being that product. So I moved up to the metro DC area, because it&#8217;s a big area, there&#8217;s a lot of different kinds of work here. And I just kind of I started in cable TV and did some work in that. And I just kept getting drawn to wanting to do more corporate and business video products that would help businesses. So that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s where I&#8217;ve been for the past 15 years. And I love the idea that businesses come to me with an idea of what they want to do. And then I help bring that to creation. And sometimes they don&#8217;t have concrete ideas. Sometimes they have goals, and then I can work with them, and collaboratively we can figure out how video can help get that goal met. Ray Sidney-Smith 4:01 And that brings us really to the first idea or point of our discussion today, which is how do you prepare for and plan out video? I think it&#8217;s it&#8217;s something that is it&#8217;s a linear construct. And so you have to think about things in terms of storyboarding, and sometimes business owners are not linear thinkers by nature. I don&#8217;t think humans are necessarily linear thinkers by nature. Some of us are, some of some of us aren&#8217;t, I&#8217;m not going to get into a psychological debate with anyone about that. But But I think how, how do you frame that for businesses? How do you get into that mindset for planning for video? Sharon Sobel 4:38 It&#8217;s not as hard as it seems, in that if there&#8217;s a couple of things that you need a couple questions really, you need to answer to start driving where this video products going to go? You want to identify who the audience is going to be? Is it going to be if it&#8217;s a marketing video, it&#8217;s likely going to be potential customers? If it&#8217;s a training video, it&#8217;s going to be people that already know your business, have some introduction to it. So who is the audience that&#8217;s important to answer? And what do you want them to know? And or do if you want them to buy something, you&#8217;ve got to have a pretty strong message if you just want them to be aware of your product or your business. Being aware of a product or business is very different than actually selling. If you think about Coca Cola ads, Coca Cola, they know that they&#8217;re out there, everybody knows what Coca Cola is. So at this point, they&#8217;re not necessarily asking you to please buy a Coca Cola, they are more in an awareness space now, where they just saturate the market so that you are definitely aware of Coca Cola anytime you&#8217;re near soda stand. So it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s a different kind of video? And then how does your product or service stand out in the marketplace? What makes it different? Why did you get into your business or the way that you do your business? Then I think Lastly, and probably the hardest question to ask is, what is this video going to look like, you can have a range of styles out there, it can be a testimonial of you, or someone with your company speaking directly to camera. That&#8217;s probably the simplest and most inexpensive video to produce. It could be a case study where you get your customers to actually kind of speak on your behalf, they had a problem they came to you this is how you solved it. Or maybe you&#8217;re a fan of those whiteboard explainer videos that are out there, those are really great when you don&#8217;t have a lot of actual video visuals available. Or you&#8217;ve got kind of an abstract concept that&#8217;s a little hard to get video of. But you don&#8217;t want necessarily just someone talking about it on camera, it&#8217;s a bit more dynamic, you can do those and kind of a package deal. So it&#8217;s a bit more predictable. So that&#8217;s the last part is kind of Pun intended picturing this video. So once you picture the video, that&#8217;s the last component, and then you can get moving. Ray Sidney-Smith 7:26 The idea here is to create a formalized kind of method for how you&#8217;re going to produce videos, and maybe mapping out a workflow diagram, maybe a flowchart of what&#8217;s going to demand what over time, because really, as a business owner, we know that we&#8217;re going to want systems in place that are going to be replicable. And that&#8217;ll make it easier the next time in the next time in the next time. So that first time out, it&#8217;s going to be a little bit more work. But that means then every time thereafter, that hard work done up front is going to kind of cascade and bring a greater productivity to your video making process. I wanted you to touch base a little bit with me, Sharon, on the scripting process. I know that you have kind of your own thoughts on this, what what&#8217;s the what&#8217;s the sort of method or the questions you asked about scripting a video Sharon Sobel 8:21 scripting your video, there&#8217;s a couple of points about scripting it that people can get into trouble with by not scripting, it. scripting ensures that you have everything covered audio and video wise. The way that I work when I&#8217;m doing a script is I make a two column script. And one column is going to be the audio everything that you&#8217;re hearing. The other column is the video everything that you&#8217;re seeing. So the audio is usually the easiest part to do. Because it provides you know, the, the script that narration for your video, you don&#8217;t want to just do a two paragraph essay. That&#8217;s great. But what are we going to see, paragraphs are great for radio and two column scripts are great for video. So once you&#8217;ve got all of the audio written down, then you can start thinking about what are people going to see when they hear that part? Are they going to see the person on camera reading it is that going to be a voiceover and we see other things will there be graphics needed, all of that kind of stuff. So that&#8217;s why I prefer to have a two column script because you&#8217;re covering both the audio and the video and you&#8217;re not leaving anything out, Sharon has actually provided us with a really great PowerPoint presentation that she has put together for what we&#8217;re talking about here today. So it&#8217;s kind of a cliff notes version in it, there&#8217;s actually a wonderful diagram, you know, sort of snapshot of one of these scripts that is a sample for you to be able to look at. So as you are listening to Sharon, you can go run over there to the show notes web and beyond cast. com forward slash 010, the episode number and you will find a link to this. So Sharon continued telling us about kind of the two column approach to scripting video with video in one column and audio and the other. Yeah, sure. And thanks for referring to that PowerPoint, because that helps here, if you are going to look at that PowerPoint, there&#8217;s actually you&#8217;ll see four columns. And the far left is the running time column, which is the amount of time that that actual shot is estimated to take then there&#8217;s the video column, what you&#8217;re going to see the audio column, what you&#8217;re going to hear, and then the last column is TRT that&#8217;s total running time, I find that&#8217;s helpful. Because if you&#8217;re aiming to not have a video more than two minutes long, if you&#8217;re not experienced in writing, you don&#8217;t know how long or short things take. So you can just do the math on the right hand side. So you see like the first one is two seconds, then the next one&#8217;s three seconds, which makes the total running time five and it just adds up on the right hand side, you can see here that everything that is on the audio side is matched on the video side with what we will be seeing at that time. I will say to add on to this, that beginner video, people will think that the video has to reflect what the audio is meaning if the line is and the sunset graciously into the distance we actually see a sun setting it doesn&#8217;t have to be that it can be something subtle or different or graphic that complements what the audio is. But it does speak for itself video can speak for itself on occasion. Ray Sidney-Smith 11:58 Yeah, and I think that&#8217;s really good for people to know is that sometimes we want we want to sometimes be literal in audio and that&#8217;s really important when you&#8217;re on a podcast like we are but video is they&#8217;re basically pictures at 20 frames per second, right, right. Or the although there could be different frames per second but you know, as a as your as you&#8217;re watching moving images, it can be far more evocative and an explanatory than, than the words and so remember that you&#8217;re trying to portray emotion and emotion as I frequently saying workshops, right. So video is supposed to explain motion and emotion and that by itself without any words can be very, very can can fill in the gaps of what you need to be said in words. I&#8217;d like to transition us into talking about shooting now the the motion part of video how how do we how do we position ourselves with some maybe tips and tricks from you from your experience in terms of getting video footage because, you know, the reality is, is that we we if we&#8217;re going to do it ourselves if you know like if I&#8217;m going to shoot video and DIY a project, I don&#8217;t have a video background. So my my goal is to get competent video. And so I&#8217;m hoping that you can give our listeners some tips to up their game. Sharon Sobel 13:18 So I&#8217;m not gonna sit here and tell you that like camera to use what camera not to use, that&#8217;s another day. Truthfully, you can use a tablet or an iPhone and shoot great video. Or you can use a standard camcorder or larger camera. It&#8217;s totally up to your resources and what you are comfortable with and experienced with. But all of those devices will produce great video. That&#8217;s That&#8217;s a true story. However, operator error does come into play. So that can be avoided with tripods. They are your friend, you can get tripods for tablets and iPhone mobile devices. I&#8217;ve seen them on Amazon pretty inexpensively, I would suggest that and then there&#8217;s some basics for shooting, try and have even lighting with not deep shadows. Avoid shooting into areas like windows that have much brighter light behind this object, because they&#8217;re going to the subject will just be completely darkened by that basic framing, meaning not too much headroom, not too much space between the top of the person&#8217;s head and the top of your frame. Those are the basics for shooting it&#8217;s really practice as far as zoom controls, and, and knowing what looks good frame wise. And, and those kinds of things. If you if you have a complex video, that&#8217;s the part that you may want to not do yourself. It just but if you&#8217;re just shooting your CEO, sitting in a chair, talking about the company that&#8217;s not really that hard. You can, you can probably do that yourself and and have a great product. So it really depends on the complexity of what you&#8217;re trying to get. As far as whether you need a professional for shooting or your video is so simple that you can do it on your own. Ray Sidney-Smith 15:14 I know that I&#8217;ve experienced the issue with daylight or having to brighter light against a chroma key back screen about Well, you&#8217;ve gotten Sharon Sobel 15:23 really advanced, right? Yeah, Ray Sidney-Smith 15:27 yeah, exactly. And so. So it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s actually taken quite a bit of time of adjusting to getting the right Kelvin lighting. Sharon Sobel 15:35 That&#8217;s really intermediate Ray. Ray Sidney-Smith 15:36 Yeah, I know. But, but I just want to mention it for people. Because I think that you think that just having big bright light on the subject, even not behind the subject, right, which, as you said, you know, having good Good, good light on person. But too much light can also be a bad thing. It can wash up a person out. I recently did a seminar where I was interviewed, and I just happened to be set up in a space because I travel all the time, I don&#8217;t control all of my spaces. And so I was in this environment and it just had this big, bright light, it looked like the light of God on me. And, and so so it just, it just washed me out and find you know, I was able to deliver the audio content, but from a video perspective, you know, it looked like I was like walking toward the light. So dear, Sharon Sobel 16:27 that&#8217;s not the kind of video you wanted to make. Ray Sidney-Smith 16:29 No, no, but you know, just talking heads. But, you know, still you should be aware that there is too much light, absolutely potential as well. You mentioned the idea of shots and the scene and so on, so forth. He talked a little bit about audio and what people should really think about when it comes to video and audio. I know that I frequently say to people, when I do video marketing workshops, that they should really pay more attention to the quality of the audio than the quality of the video. Do you agree or disagree when it&#8217;s a DIY kind of situation? Sharon Sobel 17:02 I absolutely agree. And I think a lot of people are fooled into thinking that because their device, their camera, whatever has a built in mic, that they&#8217;ve got the audio covered. And I one of the first things I tell people is that is not your primary microphone, that is your secondary microphone. It should be is for background or redundancy in case your primary microphone goes down. You haven&#8217;t lost everything. But I I strongly suggest that all of your sound should be miked. If you have someone that&#8217;s able to have a lovely or microphone put on them. If they&#8217;re the only person speaking in the scene, I definitely recommend that there are wireless versions. And there are hardwired plugin versions. Even for smartphones and tablets. They have these when I say primary microphone, that would be the microphones closest to your sound source, whether that is a person or you&#8217;re recording that the wording of the food processor you&#8217;re selling or whatever. It&#8217;s the microphone that is getting the cleanest version of your sound. Ray Sidney-Smith 18:18 That&#8217;s great advice. Thank you. I know that you also mentioned simple DIY and then getting more complex and even as I was talking about the green screen and the lighting and so forth, he said, Okay, now that&#8217;s intermediate that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s more in the the higher level stuff. Can we talk about when when you want to get a professional to help you with video, most business owners have no idea what the first step is even so can you give us some of the the kind of step by step solutions you should look for. With regard to video marketing, video professionals, not marketing professionals, video professionals like yourself, and what we should all look for in a great videographer. Sharon Sobel 19:04 Well, I&#8217;m gonna just back up a little bit and say, if you remember the beginning of our conversation, when we were talking about how do you start with your video project? And I said, is basically some questions you need to answer. Who is your audience? What do you want them to know? And or do how do you stand out those kinds of things about a start, first of all, coming up with what kind of video are you producing that really has to come first, if you&#8217;re going to then identify who you need to help you. And it may be just help that you need, you may not need everything handled real quick, I&#8217;m just going to go over three different kinds of people the basics of a video, any video product. So there&#8217;s a videographer and they do the camera work, they&#8217;ll do minimal or standard audio recording, they&#8217;re going to do the shooting for you and you want them to record the primary audio, make sure you let them know so that they bring the right gear for that, then you have an editor. Now, sometimes your videographer and editor can be the same person, if they have both those skill sets, it&#8217;s not always the case, there will be a videography process, which is the shooting there will be an editing process, which is the editing. So if the same person can do both of those things, that&#8217;s fantastic. But the editor is going to edit the video, usually per the script that they get from the client. And some editors like to have the client sit with them while they&#8217;re doing the editing. And some editors and clients would prefer to be separate. And just show me the first version, I&#8217;ll tell you what you need to fix. OK, now I&#8217;m going to look at the next version, fix these things. Okay, now we&#8217;ve got a winner. Great, I will tell you that sitting with an editor is a bit like watching sausage get made, you may not want to watch the process. But in the end, you will enjoy the product. And then the third person is a video producer, a video producer is not necessarily the client, the video producer usually is is more of a liaison between the client and any of the people that are doing the work to carry out the vision, the budget and the video, basically, from start to finish. They make sure that all of the problems that you might not realize are down the road, they make sure that those get ironed out before they happen. They can take a more proactive approach in creating the video. Ray Sidney-Smith 21:51 That&#8217;s a great explanation. I think that&#8217;s really helpful for business owners. Because if you&#8217;re not in the business, how are you supposed to know that there are actually three different professionals who work on video, right. And I think that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s really, really helpful. So do you have a a, an understanding about the difference in who you should hire and what particular environments you know, like you said, there was kind of an explainer video with maybe animation. And then there&#8217;s the talking head kind of scenarios are, are there are there general things that people should pay attention to, when it comes to choosing one particular professional over another. I know, that&#8217;s a super gross generalization. But any, any little, any little hints or tips there would be helpful. Sharon Sobel 22:32 So once you have an idea of what you want, what kind of video project you want, once you start talking to video producers, and that&#8217;s where I would start as a video producer, really ask them if they have done these kinds of projects, just like you&#8217;re envisioning. And if you don&#8217;t, if you&#8217;re not exactly sure how to communicate what you want, I find a really good idea for my clients is there&#8217;s a ton of videos out there on YouTube. And a lot of times, it helps if someone says, I want to, I really like this part of this video. I don&#8217;t like this part. And I like the graphics. And this they can give me they can show me examples. It&#8217;s sort of like having pictures before you go to your hairdresser, you may not be able to, you know, communicate what you want it to look like. But once you see it, you&#8217;re like, Yes, I like this, but not the curly part. If you can give some examples, then it gives them a good idea of what they&#8217;re going to be in for. And whether they believe they can do that job for you. If they&#8217;ve done it before. Or if it&#8217;s just kind of a cousin of work that they have done already, I think you should ask for proposal, you want to think about your video projects, sort of like a construction project? I think so the video producer is really like the general foreman, the general forming keeps everyone in line make sure everybody shows up on time knows what they need to do. That&#8217;s what the video producer does it just like you would expect a proposal and quote from any big construction project that you need to have done, you should expect the same from a video producer asked about their payment policy, are they charging you in advance? Are they charging you after they&#8217;ve delivered the product for myself? My company generally we we do it in phases, because I think it helps small business owners with cash flow. So and it helps me with cash flow, to be honest. So we bill at the pre production stage, the production stage, and then a month after the product has been delivered, it breaks the payment up into three different payments. One of the most important things I think you should ask is how would the company handle a change in the scope of the project that could affect the cost. Unfortunately, I and along with many other video producers, when they first started, they got burned a lot, because people would start with one vision. And then as the project progressed, things would go wrong. Or they would change their mind down this or that. And if there&#8217;s not communication between the producer and the client, the producer is going to end up not being able to charge for that. And it&#8217;s it&#8217;s not a good feeling. If you again, going back to the construction analogy, if you decide to change your floor tile, from vinyl to porcelain, that&#8217;s a price difference. And your contract was originally for vinyl. So there needs to be a process in place that both sides understand that will be put into effect if the project change because that it&#8217;s not unusual for a project to change along the way. Ask them how long the process will take. And if that is in their proposal, any deadlines or milestones that you can expect? And then lastly, how do they charge for editing? How do they calculate how much editing a project will take? So some people charge on a flat fee for editing based on the project. Other people charging hourly amount? And if they&#8217;re charging an hourly amount, you want to understand how they calculate that. And it&#8217;s not that you have the answer for for how they&#8217;re calculating that. But you want to make sure they have an answer. That sounds a little odd. I know. But like for myself, I know that it takes me depending on the product, it may take me to two hours per one minute of finished video of editing time. So if you come to me and say you want a five minute video, I&#8217;m going to say okay, the editing will probably take maybe 10 to 12 hours, I&#8217;ll put in two hours of you know, buffer just in case things go wrong. That&#8217;s why I say ask that question. Because otherwise, they may be really not understanding how long a project will take. They might actually even overcharge you because they don&#8217;t want to get burnt. Ray Sidney-Smith 27:24 I want to take a step back and and talk about tools. We&#8217;re going to get to the best tool of the week. But I wanted I wanted to talk specifically about some of these video tools with you. Because I think that sometimes you come across a video project and you need to figure out what you&#8217;re going to use to make these things happen. And it&#8217;s kind of like going back to your construction analogy. You need to know what kind of wrench you&#8217;re going to need. You need to know what kind of hammer what are the what are the supplies you&#8217;re going to need? Can you go over a little bit for us what you need in the scripting shooting and editing process. If you you are going to DIY project and if you&#8217;re going to provide if you&#8217;re going to hire a professional Do you need any of these tools yourself in in the process? Because I think that i think it&#8217;s it&#8217;s legitimate to know are you going to need video hosting for example, even though you&#8217;re not producing the video at the end of the day, you&#8217;re going to be handed a video and and what do you do with that thing. Sharon Sobel 28:24 So for scripting, I just use Microsoft Word using the table feature that I think most people have Microsoft Word as far as shooting I mentioned you can use whatever device you have smartphone tablet camcorder, but record the sound with a microphone plugged into it, not just a camera mic. And if your device does not have a means to plug in a microphone of some sort. Do not use it. Please do not use it for recording video. Then editing. There&#8217;s, there&#8217;s I&#8217;ve got in the PowerPoint. Five different things that people can look at as far as editing. And one of them actually will allow you to create an animated explainer video for up to 45 seconds. That might be something to try out. That&#8217;s for free just to get your feet wet. I guess there&#8217;s a couple other editing apps out there that allow you to kind of DIY your editing. There&#8217;s a YouTube video editor, there&#8217;s another thing to record, convert and compress your videos for online delivery. And of course, you do need a place to put those videos. So you know, my world is creating videos. But I&#8217;m counting on the fact that you as my client know what you&#8217;re going to do with those videos, I&#8217;m going to defer to you on that Ray for that kind of advice. Ray Sidney-Smith 29:56 Totally. And so so that takes us kind of to the one of the points we were discussing in the ramp up to us talking today was the fact that in your world, your job is to help with the production of video and editing and then finalizing the product. But it&#8217;s not marketing the video how to get it seen is not your job. And I think that I think that a lot of people miss that fact in the video marketing world, right. We hear about video marketing, we hear about the importance of video marketing. And it is important. I mean, the world is going toward video slowly but surely. And we are seeing all kinds of new platforms come alive. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about this and get your thoughts on it as well, first and foremost, to say that once you have a final video, whether it&#8217;s a 32nd video, a 10 second video, for example, for Instagram stories all the way up to full length feature length films, you need to get it someplace. So you know, you need to figure out we&#8217;re going to host it you need to figure out also how you were going to distribute that video from a marketing perspective and how you&#8217;re going to use that as it within a broader content strategy. So think about these things in terms of what the videos goal is going back to what Sharon said earlier, what&#8217;s the what&#8217;s the reason for creating this video? Why do you want it created? And what&#8217;s its message going to be and look at the overarching business itself to figure out how video will be used integrated with all of the various other marketing and sales features are you going to use this video as a part of your sales presentation is it going to be something that&#8217;s just available to to potential customers on their journey from top of the funnel, you know, someone who&#8217;s just interested in your business to middle of the funnel, who&#8217;s a lead to eventually someone who is a who&#8217;s ready to buy now customer. So as you understand these various parts of where the video is going to be utilized, then you can much better understand what kind of video you&#8217;re going to create. We have a couple of platforms that are really important today. And I want to cover those platforms and kind of hear your thoughts, Sharon in terms of which ones you see more clients wanting to produce for today, at least from the professional hiring side. And then I can kind of give an idea in terms of the DIY side. So first is YouTube. We&#8217;ve already mentioned YouTube. There&#8217;s Vimeo. And then we have the we have Instagram Instagrams actually split into two different categories. Now as of just recently Instagram launched something called IPTV so you have Instagram video which is available within stories which is limited to 10 seconds and then you have Instagram posts also I believe there&#8217;s a 10 second limitation on that and now Instagram has produced IPTV there&#8217;s actually a separate app although I don&#8217;t believe you need the separate app in order to experience it TV I&#8217;ve downloaded and installed it just because I wanted to be experience the the pure IPTV world and so I ggV is actually very different from all of the other video that&#8217;s out there though so i g TV is vertical as opposed to in landscape mode so you&#8217;re watching it purely in portrait you can&#8217;t publish in in landscape if you publish in landscape than it shrinks it down and makes it vertical so it looks horrible and the idea is is that it&#8217;s for a mobile first new to the new technology young people so so these are young people who are who have never really experienced the landscape video they&#8217;re there on mobile only world and they are experienced that so i ggV is very cool very new and for the right businesses this can be very powerful because it allows you to create video with your tablet or your smartphone right wherever you are and it&#8217;s much more I want to say authentic or real but it&#8217;s not meant to be highly produced necessarily it&#8217;s meant to be a interaction and engagement tool you you&#8217;re allowed up to an hour of video as opposed to 10 seconds so that&#8217;s a that&#8217;s a big difference and you recorded on your phone you upload it you edit it potentially you know on your phone and then and then upload it directly so you have a lot of latitude there and and we&#8217;ll see as more businesses become aware of IPTV and then utilizing that that service. Then we switch gears to the live video. And right now we have YouTube Live, we have Facebook Live. And we have Periscope, which is owned by Twitter. And so you&#8217;ll see the the live streams in Twitter provided by by Periscope. And these are again, options for different kinds of video. YouTube Live is available within your mobile phone in the YouTube app, you just click on the little camera icon and boom, you can YouTube Live, right? Same thing with Facebook Live, you can do it on your desktop on your computer. Or you can do it on the tablet through the Facebook app. And then Periscope, which is available through the Twitter app. And again, that&#8217;s mobile only. And again, that&#8217;s that kind of vertical video. Although I believe you can you can do landscape periscope or Twitter live video. And so you have those options as well. So you have to really decide how to plan out your video strategy to match whether or not you&#8217;re going to do something live. Or you&#8217;re going to have something pre recorded and then distributed over time. Sharon Have you seen more people doing more or less since you pay attention to the video world? Are you seeing more people do more types of videos in in an on particular platforms? Sharon Sobel 35:51 Yeah. Um, thanks for asking about that. I think YouTube is still the traditional outlet that people think first and foremost when it comes to putting their videos online. And YouTube has definitely improved over the years. And the fact that you can pretty easily embed the YouTube player into a website does make it appealing, or you don&#8217;t have to get too complicated the Instagram thing, it&#8217;s I gotta be honest, it&#8217;s a little new to me. And that was intriguing. I&#8217;m going to look more into that. And then as far as live video, what I really call web streaming, those have definitely been used more I want to say in like corporate event video. So maybe it&#8217;s a product launch that you&#8217;ve got, and you want to, you know, not just share it with the 50 people that are there at your office that day, when you&#8217;re launching a new product, but you want to share it with the world, you can use web streaming to do that as a live event. And then that&#8217;s also been used in a much bigger scale as far as conferences and conventions that may want to start using those platforms to show particular maybe a keynote or just a you know, a breakout session that would be of interest to people, that kind of thing. Ray Sidney-Smith 37:31 What I always say the businesses is you need to think about every moment in your business was an opportunity to capture content, right. And there is there&#8217;s no question in my mind that businesses have content to share, they just don&#8217;t think about the opportunities to capture it, they don&#8217;t have the systems in place. And so if you&#8217;re listening, your job is to create the systems to be able to capture the content so that it matches your strategy. And so just as Sharon said, you know, the idea that you have various types of things that happened throughout your business life cycle, you need to figure out which moments are for which audiences, right, so the the corporate board meeting that you have once a year, if you&#8217;re a corporation, or you know, an established entity that has a requirement for it, that&#8217;s probably not the most exciting luxurious thing to video. But you know, you might record that for stakeholders, maybe not with audio, but it becomes really great B roll kind of that background video that&#8217;s playing while you put some text on it, you know, you&#8217;re not, you&#8217;re not actually airing any of the things that are actually said. But the background video is now seeing all of the various public faces of your company together in the same room, discussing pertinent, important issues. And now you can place text on top of that&#8217;s talking about, you know, new exciting things that are being discussed about the business. And that might be really great for stakeholders. Whereas if you&#8217;re a pastry shop, and you want to capture the morning pastry coming out of the oven, you might have to train your pastry chef or your other staff who is making the coffee and who&#8217;s getting the display put together to turn on Periscope or YouTube live with their phone and broadcasting that through your your social channels to be able to let people know as they wake up in the morning, they see the YouTube Live for your pastry shop or your cafe and they see those fresh baked goods and that coffee steaming out of the pot and being made and that&#8217;s going to excite them about your brand and wanting to come make that pitstop on their way to work to come buy from you as as opposed to buying from Starbucks, or Dunkin Donuts, or one of the other large commercial brands, you need to be able to really use video in ways that are not difficult. But you need to learn how to create the systems to capture the moments Sharon Sobel 40:08 I love that point about it doesn&#8217;t seem very dynamic to capture imagery at a corporate board meeting. But you know, one of the first things that I asked when I meet with a new client is what media assets Do you already have in hand that we might be able to use that will save you money, I don&#8217;t have to reshoot it, we don&#8217;t have to stage it, you already have this stuff. And you own the copyrights so we can include it in your video. So I love the idea of getting a lot of media there. Even though you don&#8217;t necessarily know how it&#8217;s going to be used down the road, maintaining a library of it, and in some way at your company is it can be very helpful later. And cost saving. Ray Sidney-Smith 40:54 I love it. I love the idea of being useful and cost saving. And we as we near the end of our our discussion about this particular topic. And then we&#8217;ll get to best tool of the week do you have any parting thoughts for small business owners who are looking to do video Sharon Sobel 41:11 we&#8217;ve covered a lot in this conversation. And I think it&#8217;s it&#8217;s just really important that business owners understand first of all, who their audience is, what their mission is in creating the video. But you know, my I think the bottom line for me is, it doesn&#8217;t matter how great your video is, or how many of them you have. If you don&#8217;t have a plan in place to get other eyes on them. All of your efforts are in vain. If nobody looks at them. Ray Sidney-Smith 41:44 I couldn&#8217;t agree more. I couldn&#8217;t agree more. And thank you. Thank you for that now up best tool of the week, this is where I get a chance to share with you. And our guest gets to share with you their best tool favorite tool that they&#8217;re currently using. And of course, tools change. So take it for what it is. But we&#8217;re going to talk today about two different tools. One that both Sharon and myself are really excited about of late. So I&#8217;m going to start with the with an application called ripple. And that is spelled r i p L. And again, there are links to this in the show notes. And so ripple is a video an animated video tool that allows you to share to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn all in one tap. There is an iPhone app. And there is a Google Android app in the Play Store. And how it works is that you add photos and text to each post, you choose a layout, you kind of have a theme or what they call a style to customize each of these posts. And then the then you write your caption, add your hash hash tags, and so on, so forth. And ripple produces a video from that content, and then pushes it out to all of the social channels that you want it to. It is brilliant. And the way that it operates. There&#8217;s a free version. And then there is a pro version. And the pro version comes with many more animated designs, it allows you to be able to put your logo on every post, you can have more images in each of the designs, you can add music and, and more fonts. And you can also schedule posts. And then of course, save the videos locally in the pro version. So the pro version is really quite worth it. But I&#8217;d say try out the free version first, see if it works for you for what you&#8217;re trying to do. And then you can use ripple on the pro version. And like I said, I&#8217;ve, I&#8217;ve now been testing it with several clients. And it&#8217;s been a really game changer for them. Because for the everyday kinds of posts, again, going back to the pastry shop kind of environment, being able to push out the ephemeral video that needs to go out all the time that having a tool that just can produce it as opposed to the more professional stuff that Sharon and I were talking about earlier. This is This creates a professional video but more for a femoral post. So I&#8217;m going to turn it over to you. Now. Sharon, you have a pretty interesting tool of the week that I would not have guessed when when you set it along to me. And then I then I checked out the website for it. And I was like, I could use this at home. So So tell us a little bit about the rock and roller cart. Sharon Sobel 44:39 I swear I I spent like a week thinking about how I was going to answer that. When you told me I had to come up with a tool because there&#8217;s a lot of great things out there that I loved. I&#8217;m going to check out this ripple thing but the rock and roller car it was the very first thing I bought when I decided to be self employed in video production. And I still have the same one that I bought over 15 years ago. So I&#8217;m like that&#8217;s got to be a favorite thing, right? I mean, I&#8217;ve had it for 15 years. I use it every time I have a shoot. And just so you guys know what this thing is. It&#8217;s a cart that allows you to allows me to carry big cases of video gear but you can use it however you like. And it has eight different configurations. It has wheels, you can get the wheels that are inflatable or you can get hard rubberized ones. And I think you get the hard rubberized ones. That thing is going to last last forever. I had like a little tune up done on it a couple months ago at Ace Hardware. I just brought my card and I was like it&#8217;s a little wobbly. Can you check this screw and and they just tightened it all up. For me. It was great. So and it collapses. And it fits like in my car behind my backseat. So the fact that it&#8217;s so strong and compact and versatile. That is why it is my favorite tool. Ray Sidney-Smith 46:03 I think that&#8217;s fantastic. Yeah, they have all of these various wheels they have. The the cart itself is is amazing. As you said it&#8217;s it&#8217;s highly configurable and you&#8217;re moving things of any kind. It just looks phenomenal. It&#8217;s great. And it just stores easily love it. Thank you for sharing that. And so this brings us to the end of our conversation. Sharon Sobel of picture this video, how can people learn more about you stay in touch with you get in touch with you if they wanted to. Sharon Sobel 46:35 So to get in touch with me, you just go to my website. All of the social stuff is there Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and you can see more of the stuff that I&#8217;m about and stuff that I&#8217;ve produced. PictureThisVideo.net Ray Sidney-Smith 46:48 thank you so much Sharon, for joining me here today on web and beyondcast. Sharon Sobel 46:53 You&#8217;re welcome. Thanks for having me. Ray Sidney-Smith 46:54 Thanks for listening to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond. I&#8217;m your host Ray Sidney-Smith. Until next time, here&#8217;s to your small business success on the web and beyond.

This is the first episode of our new monthly series, The State of Small Business Technology, September 2018 Edition. During the last week of each month, I’m dedicating a whole episode to news and happenings in small business technologies. This will lend heavily on the side of Web, Mobile and Social Media marketing content for Small Business, but I’ll also touch on other small business management technologies, such as IT and cybersecurity, as well economic development news and more, when appropriate. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://webandbeyondcast.com/009 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. Next week, I have a great conversation with Sharon Sobel of Picture This Video, a video production expert, to talk about video marketing and production for Small Business. This is going to be a great rundown for you to understand how to actually get the videos made that are so popular on the Web, Mobile and Social Media today. I can’t wait to hear back from you on this topic once you get a chance to listen to it. In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Facebook and Instagram News Facebook Blueprint courses Learn How to Master Marketing on Instagram with These Blueprint Elearning Courses Making Digital Skills More Accessible to Everyone &#124; Facebook Newsroom Facebook Will Now Allow Pages to Join Facebook Groups &#124; Social Media Today Instagram&#8217;s Testing an Option to Add Hashtags Without Having to Include Them in the Caption &#124; Social Media Today Instagram Adds Private Polls to Direct Messages &#124; Social Media Today What&#8217;s New at Google, September 2018 Edition Google is revamping search on its 20th anniversary &#8211; here are the most exciting new features G Suite Updates Blog: New G Suite adoption and productivity insights tool launching in Beta G Suite Updates Blog: Real-time presence in Microsoft Office to become available October 17th Google Home Hub might cost $149 according to a report &#8211; 9to5Google Podcasting for Small Business (sign up via this link for notifications for my forthcoming book with Steve Orr of Steve Orr Media!) Google Podcasts adds support for Chromecast &#8211; 9to5Google YouTube will soon start showing vertical video ads &#8211; 9to5Google Google retiring &#8216;Gmail Offline&#8217; Chrome app &#8211; 9to5Google Google unsurprisingly killing Inbox by Gmail next year &#8211; 9to5Google Google Announces That its Data Studio Tool is Now Available to All Users &#124; Social Media Today Other News and Resources [2018 Update] The Best Time to Post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. &#124; Falcon.io 5 Things You Should Be Doing Right Now to Prepare for Giving Tuesday &#124; Social Media Today  and Be a neighborhood champion &#8211; Shop Small® &#8211; American Express (Black Friday is November 23, 2018; Small Business Saturday, November 24, 2018; Cyber Monday, November 26, 2018; and, Giving Tuesday, November 27, 2018) Meet the new Wave The 16 Best Video Editing Apps You Must Use In 2018 Amazon Woos Small Sellers Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360d03f2" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360d03f2" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360d03f2" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360d03f2" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Voiceover Artist 0:00 Welcome to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond with your host Ray Sidney-Smith. &#160; Ray Sidney-Smith 0:15 Hello their small business owners entrepreneurs economic development agents and community Welcome to season one episode 9009 of weapon beyond cast today is the first episode of the state of Small Business Technology September 2018 edition during the last week of the month I&#8217;m dedicating a whole episode to news and happenings in small business technology this will lend heavily on the marketing content obviously but I&#8217;ll also touch on other business and economic development news when appropriate. Links to all the news sources are provided in the show notes at web and beyond cast.com forward slash 009 which is the episode number episodes typically go out on Tuesdays. But this last episode of the month will be a little bit more variable as breaking news happens. And so just something to take note of if you don&#8217;t see Ray Sidney-Smith 1:00 Episode drop on a Tuesday it&#8217;s likely because it&#8217;s the last week of the month okay on with state of Small Business Technology sep tember 2018 edition of weapon beyond cast to preface this episode will be broken up into three different segments segment one will cover social media marketing and other technology news and this month we&#8217;re going to talk about primarily Facebook and Instagram segment two will be a regular segment called what&#8217;s new at Google I used to put out a quarterly blog post and I may actually start doing this again called what&#8217;s new at Google and so we&#8217;re going to talk about all the various things that are happening at Google I am the Google Small Business advisor for productivity and so that really means that I talk a lot about g sweet Google&#8217;s productivity suite for small business owners so if you have interest in learning more about g sweet Feel free to touch base and I&#8217;m always happy to help you with figuring out how to get g sweet implemented into your business will do what&#8217;s new at Google segment and then we will segue into kind of miscellaneous right miscellaneous news events listener questions. Maybe there&#8217;s been some Marotta and so I will correct anything that I&#8217;ve said in past episodes in this episode during this final segment so let&#8217;s kick into Facebook news and what they have to talk about regarding their platform and Instagram this month. First and foremost if you don&#8217;t know Facebook has a platform called Facebook blueprint and Facebook blueprint allows you to be able to login with your Facebook credentials and you&#8217;re taking into a course learning platform that gives you access to all kinds of information on how to use Facebook and its various products. So Facebook owns Instagram, they own WhatsApp, they own messenger, the Facebook Messenger application and many other applications and all of those that are appropriate to business. They have expanded their course platform to include as of Friday September 21, 2018, they&#8217;ve included new Instagram courses so they have an Instagram for business course they&#8217;ve they&#8217;ve 3:00 Have one about Instagram stories and of course, Instagram buying objectives, how to use the Instagram ads platform for greater effect. And so I would highly recommend that you check that out. And again like I said links to all of these are in the show notes but you can go to Facebook blueprint. com and access all of the courses and they&#8217;re all free. So they want you to obviously create pages, they want you to start ad campaigns and they are facilitating your ability to do so through giving this information away for free. So really cool stuff. Continuing on with the education side of Facebook. Facebook is actually partnered with the National Urban League to train small businesses across the United States. And they launched with a with a program in Columbus, Ohio, and they&#8217;re doing all kinds of wonderful investment in Columbus. However, since that event is over, I wanted to tell you that starting in 2019, they have put out a press release that says there&#8217;ll be offering trainings and social media strategy and 4:00 Digital Marketing at 13 different National Urban League locations in the following cities and that was quoting from their news release and continuing to quote these are the cities that they will be in Atlanta, Georgia, Baltimore, Maryland, Chicago, Illinois, Cincinnati, Ohio, Cleveland, Ohio, Houston, Texas, Jacksonville, Florida, Kansas City, Missouri, Las Vegas, Nevada, Los Angeles, California, New Orleans or Nolan&#8217;s, Louisiana, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Washington DC and the District of Columbia. If you happen to be in one of those cities or nearby to travel to them. I will be paying attention to this so that when they do announce the actual dates in 2019, I will notify you in one of these podcasts. Okay, but I think it&#8217;s really great that they&#8217;re giving free training away on social media strategy and digital marketing. Take advantage of it if you are near one of those cities, and the date works for you. 5:00 Right now on to some of the kind of new features and so forth that are coming to the Facebook platform and the Instagram platform. One is that Facebook is now going to allow pages to join Facebook groups. This is fantastic. I have long felt that you should be able to as a Facebook page, join a group and engaging conversations as your brand if you don&#8217;t want to expose your personal self on behalf of the business. You know, there are lots of businesses where the brand is more important than the individual especially in a small business environment where so much of your brand can sometimes be consumed by the persona of the owner. So now you can go into a Facebook group if the Facebook group allows it join as the Facebook page and therefore be able to interact and engage in the Facebook group which means that social listening you want to be listening on social media commenting and engaging with content as your Facebook 6:00 Page not as yourself so that people learn about you and want to follow your Facebook page and want to follow your content and engage with it. So this is one next level step for you to be able to do social listening on a much more brand focused level. So I really like that and thanks to Facebook for finally bringing that feature to us. Next up is Instagram is actually starting to test an option This is not available yet but I think it&#8217;s something that you need to start considering as you plan for next year social media strategy which is that they&#8217;re planning to add hashtags automatically without you having to add them into the into the post description so this is obviously a huge change. It&#8217;s something that Google Plus did several years ago where they automatically started tagging things on your behalf by looking at the keywords and looking at the the social graph and deciding what tags became become hashtags within the system. And so keep a lookout this this will hopefully save 7:00 bunch of time for you to when you&#8217;re adding things. So in the interface, it&#8217;ll just say, okay, add these hashtags, and then you&#8217;ll be able to add them automatically. And that won&#8217;t take up your hashtag limit. Most likely right now you&#8217;re kept at 30 tags per post. But this hashtag platform seems to be not limited so far. Maybe they will limited at some point. But the in the tests that I&#8217;ve seen, and from the reporting that I&#8217;ve seen, there is no hashtag limits so far, so not sure when it will come to pass, but I will certainly keep you updated as they they roll out this feature to two business profiles. And last but not least, on the Instagram side of the Facebook Instagram side, Instagram has added private polls to direct messages. So from a small business perspective, the ability to be able to send private messages to select groups of your audience is really powerful. Now you can 8:00 send these polls and say what&#8217;s your favorite color? What are what are some products that you&#8217;d like to see us develop in the current fiscal year or in next year&#8217;s product development cycle you can start asking people about which holidays meet mean more to them are they are they a particular demographic are not a particular demographic. If that information is not being presented to you by virtue of reviewing the insights within Instagram, so now you&#8217;re capable of starting to get 8:29 engagement with your best audience members and also start to collect some marketing research with these light touch point tools. And so just like with Twitter polls, and all the others, you&#8217;re now capable of asking marketing questions directly to audience members. So this is going to be a really powerful tool if you choose to use it and so I highly recommend it. I think that&#8217;s that it&#8217;s a fantastic new feature it&#8217;s it&#8217;s definitely an indicator that Instagram wants to have these kinds 9:00 of private or exclusive engagement opportunities for influencers, but also small business owners. So keep that in mind. With that. Let&#8217;s move on to what&#8217;s new at Google September 2018. So Google owned by alphabet, the holding company of the search engine juggernaut is 20 years old. This week, they turned 20 years old. And so 20 years ago, in September, this small company called back rub, became Google and launched one of the largest companies in the world, they&#8217;re now valued. I think it&#8217;s $668 billion, just behind apple and head of Microsoft. And they are in the process of launching a whole bunch of new features that I think will be really useful for your consumers for the people who are trying to buy from you. And I think that this is really important for you to understand how Google is trying to connect the dots to be able to give you information. So let&#8217;s start off with Ray Sidney-Smith 10:00 Google and the activity cards feature that they launched at their 20th anniversary event. So activity cards is for a consumer say, I am searching for buying some new shoes. And I go online, and I do a search for shoes. You know, maybe I&#8217;m trying to figure out what the most comfortable type of shoes are for my feet, and figuring how to get the right size and style and so on, so forth. So I do a couple Searches related to that. Well, Google is now going to know when I&#8217;ve done those searches. And they&#8217;re going to bundle them together and what they call an activity card so that I&#8217;m able to see these all as an aggregated view to come back to later. So say, two weeks from now, three weeks from now I come back and I do another search about shoes, but I haven&#8217;t bought shoes. Now I can see all of those searches together so that I can make a more informed decision. So for you as a business owner, you want to think about how you&#8217;re optimizing your website so that the various different pages you have and the products you have and say your ecommerce solution is Ray Sidney-Smith 11:00 Presented allows for this kind of whole body approach. Because Google is starting to look at things not from just a keyword perspective, but from a topical perspective. So you need to have multiple pages that talk about the various things that I, as a consumer going to be interested in, right. So I&#8217;m going to be interested in shoes style, if you own a shoe store, you&#8217;re going to want to have pages on your on your website. Even if it&#8217;s just an e commerce site, you&#8217;re going to have pages on the site that help discuss style size fitting all those kinds of topics. Because as an aggregate, they become the thing that I come back to, to be able to decide do I buy from you are do I buy from one of your competitors or go to big business and and and buy from a large aggregated site like Amazon or Walmart or Target or otherwise you want them to come to your site. So the more often they get a touch point Google is basically giving you the opportunity for them to circle back around to you if they&#8217;ve searched and seeing your pages before that brings us to search collections. So search collections are away from Ray Sidney-Smith 12:00 Google to be able to take all the various search results that you&#8217;ve done from your activity cards, and then to put them into a collection. And so again, this is me as a consumer, I&#8217;m now able to save a collection of all of the various cards that I have put together into a particular topic. So say that I want to go buy those shoes now. Now I can I can create a men&#8217;s shoes collection, or I can save all those things. And then what Google will do is recommend some related items that I might want to add to that collection because I haven&#8217;t seen it before. So now instead of having to plan a shoot shopping trip without knowledge, I&#8217;m being in empowered with that information so that I can go ahead and look at that information together. So it&#8217;s going to be really powerful tool, I think for small business owners who take advantage of the various ways in which Google has encouraging its users. To do that. What you need to do is you need to encourage your buyers when you come into contact with them in a retail environment. Ray Sidney-Smith 13:00 or anywhere else say, make sure to create a collection. And here it goes some pages we have on our website about these materials, they&#8217;ll look them up when you find them, add them to collection, and you will then have that available to you for future resources. So it&#8217;s just a little bit of view, educating people about how Google can help you bring business into your door, right? A little bit meta, but you can do it. Next up is app stories. So very similar to snap inks, Snapchat stories to Facebook&#8217;s Instagram stories and Pinterest stories feature. We now have amp stories. Amp stands for accelerated mobile pages, and Google couldn&#8217;t help themselves. But to bring the AMP stories to fruition. What this does is Google&#8217;s using machine learning to create accelerated mobile pages stories and they will be focusing right now on particular verticals, but presumably they&#8217;ll adopt this as a standard for showing stories on mobile, so Ray Sidney-Smith 14:00 Stories are vertical stories in the sense that they take up the full screen of a phone or tablet. And they display it that way. So that it&#8217;s a rich, immersive experience for people as they&#8217;re taking in the content. So you need to start thinking about how you&#8217;re going to start displaying content. So that app stories display your website content in the same way. Okay, so I&#8217;ll be talking about this again in future episodes. But right now just start to think about how vertical screen content can be displayed for your web content. Next up is Google is starting to feature videos in their searches so that there are actually going to be looking at snippets not the whole video so they&#8217;re able to look at frame by frame and all of the audio within a video today that is posted to YouTube or otherwise. And they are actually selecting specific sections of video that might answer questions that users type into the Google search engine, so Ray Sidney-Smith 15:00 Now you need to think about your videos, not just from the whole video perspective, but are there sections within your video that actually answer questions? And can you optimize those for Google&#8217;s search engine algorithm. So this is a whole new paradigm of search engine optimization. And I think it&#8217;s really powerful. Because what it will do is will get more people aware of getting their questions answered, and bringing your brand in front of them. Google&#8217;s also instituted several other features and other cool stuff not particularly relevant to small business yet, so I&#8217;m not going to talk about it. But I just wanted you to know that in their in their 20th anniversary event, they did launch these few new features that I think are really important and powerful for you a couple of G sweet updates that I wanted to let you know. One is that G Suite is now launching a productivity insights tool. And what will happen is you can apply for the beta and so this isn&#8217;t a beta test. Ray Sidney-Smith 16:00 mode. And what you can do is it&#8217;s called work insights. If you&#8217;re the G sweet administrator, you can go and apply. And again, the link is in the show notes to the Google blog where they have the link to apply for the beta. And what it does is it it looks at the impact of G Suite in your organization on three different perspectives. So adoption, what team members are actually using G Suite and the apps they use most frequently collaboration, how our teams working together, that is, how they&#8217;re how they&#8217;re handling meetings, so that it&#8217;s looking at Google Calendar, and otherwise, file sharing, and then document collaboration. And then finally, activity, which is what apps the teams are spending time in and how much time they&#8217;re spending in meetings together. So with those metrics, it can determine I&#8217;m quoting here, the metrics in the dashboard can help you determine how quickly your workforce is adopting g sweet how teams are collaborating if they&#8217;re using g sweet products as expected, and if you need additional training resources to help users understand a new workflow. Ray Sidney-Smith 17:00 So this is really important that if you&#8217;re going to invest in G sweet as an IT infrastructure for your business, you can really start to understand what people are doing with work insights and then determine Do I need to bring someone in? Do I need to provide more education in terms of how people do or incentivizing people to use the the G sweet products we have, as opposed to using potentially insecure or at least non optimal tools outside of the Google ecosystem, right, because you get the benefit of security and seamlessness of the workflow inside of G. Sweet. Also, Google has announced last week that they are bringing the real time presence abilities for say, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and otherwise to Microsoft Office documents as of October 17, 2018. Ray Sidney-Smith 17:54 So what this means is that if you use Word Excel or PowerPoint in their native file Ray Sidney-Smith 18:00 formats, you can now when when you put those into Google Drive, right? Because Google Drive is if you think about it as Dropbox, it&#8217;s basically the file storage component of G Suite. When you put files in there, now, users will actually be able to see if someone is viewing or editing one of those Microsoft Office files so that they don&#8217;t edit the same version at the same time and create conflicts, this is going to be a really huge benefit to productivity so that you don&#8217;t have that kind of problem happened in the future. So look out for that in your Google Drive settings within the admin at the admin admin console. And you can go ahead and activate that as of October 17. I also wanted to note that Google will be retiring the Gmail Offline Chrome app that some of you may know love and to use, but don&#8217;t fear, the reason why they&#8217;re actually retiring the Gmail Offline application is because they&#8217;ve actually bundled that functionality into the new Ray Sidney-Smith 19:00 New Gmail. So with the new Gmail has come a number of different things. One is that Gmail Offline will be taken out of the web store on December 3. And so that means if you are using that on the consumer level, just the normal, you know, Google consumer account, you just have an at gmail account or whatever, you need to, obviously deactivate that before December 3, and just activate that functionality within your normal Gmail, the new Gmail interface. And if you&#8217;re a G Suite administrator, you need to make sure that you enable that at the domain level, and then tell your users to go ahead and do the same. And that way, both levels will allow Gmail Offline in that same vein, as new things come, all things must go. And so unfortunately, Google will be killing off the inbox by Gmail application next year, as they brought out and launched the new Gmail are taking those experimental features that Ray Sidney-Smith 20:00 Or tested in Google inbox or inbox by Gmail and are bringing those into the new Gmail interface. So as of March 2019, inbox by Gmail will say goodbye be be aware of that. That if you use inbox as a workflow for various things that task management saving items from your Chrome mobile browser to inbox by Gmail, or otherwise, you need to start changing those workflows over now to the new Gmail, a lot of the functionality that that is an inbox by Gmail is available already in the new Gmail, but they&#8217;ll Of course, be pushing all of the other email, experiential features over to inbox by Gmail. And so inbox is going I just want to let you know now so you can start figuring it out. You have a good six months at this point to start the process. And I know how important email is to many of us. So make sure that you start moving over to that so you know, smart replies. Ray Sidney-Smith 21:00 All of those kinds of features are moving over into the Gmail applications on Android, iOS, as well as in the new Gmail desktop interface. Okay, a couple of fun things. Google Home hub has been announced. And it is still one of those things that a lot of people don&#8217;t know about. So I just wanted to explain it to you. So this is a smart display, very similar to a Google Home, or Amazon Alexa, the Siri home pod. These are devices that sit in your office or home. I&#8217;m going to talk about this from an office perspective. But what will happen is you have now Google Home hub, which is a smart display, which means that it&#8217;s a visual display and speaker so you can actually see its responses and it can give you audio feedback and so on, so forth. But the idea is that you then have a display ready and available to you for being able to interact with Google Assistant so you can ask it questions and it will then be able to display those Ray Sidney-Smith 22:00 products, those search results and otherwise on screen so we can give you instructions that can tell you how long it will take to get to your next meeting. and all kinds of other really important information that you might want to have at hand. This is going to be a great tool, and I can&#8217;t wait to play around with it in my own office. And there&#8217;s no camera on this product. So this is a little bit different than maybe some of the other ones that have cameras, but this one will not have a camera just so you have an idea. I think for those who are privacy focused, that&#8217;s actually a benefit for me, I would like it probably to have a little bit more functionality with a camera because it can potentially do more if it doesn&#8217;t have that camera, but it doesn&#8217;t have a camera, at least in this version, some from the reports I&#8217;ve been hearing, it&#8217;s going to only be priced at 150 bucks. So if that&#8217;s the case, and it actually comes out at $150 later this year. That&#8217;s really really cost effective. And it allows you to put a smart display in offices to be able to have you and your staff interact and engage Ray Sidney-Smith 23:00 With g sweet and other products within the Google ecosystem pretty easily, so just keep, keep an eye on it. I think that the Internet of Things, which is where the home hub lives, right, in the connected devices world, your business is going to be a huge productivity beneficiary of these kinds of connected devices, what we call the Internet of Things. And I think Google Home hub is going to find a proper place in that ecosystem. All right, Google podcasts is getting Chromecast support. So for those of you who have listened to past episodes, you know this, but for those of you who have not, I am putting out a book called podcasting for small business with my co author, Steve or Steve or media. Google has recently launched an application called Google podcasts. And so if you want to listen to a podcast you can use on the Android platform, you can just install Google podcasts and you&#8217;re off to the races. And one of the big missing features was the ability to stream the podcast from your phone or tablet or from the Google podcasts app. Ray Sidney-Smith 24:00 To Chromecast, which is the the device that you can connect to televisions so that you&#8217;re able to then stream content from your mobile device to a TV. And so now we&#8217;re getting that support. We&#8217;re getting Chromecast support. So it&#8217;s going to be a really, really great functionality. So if you&#8217;re smart TV, you know, say you have a smart TV in your office or conference room. Now if you have a Chromecast or have that smart TV support for Chromecast, you will now be able to play Google podcasts directly into the Smart TV or Chromecast supported devices. Very, very cool stuff. YouTube will soon start showing vertical video ads alongside video recommendations. And so if you don&#8217;t know this, Google has started within YouTube. So Google owns YouTube and YouTube has started to allow you to record in vertical view this is in competition with Instagram and Snapchat and others where you&#8217;re able to to record Ray Sidney-Smith 25:00 You know, a live stream video stream kind of event in vertical video. But YouTube now is allowing you to record non live video and then upload it. Very similar to IPTV, which is Instagrams TV channel app. Now you&#8217;re capable of potentially displaying ads. So if your business is thinking about doing Google ads, this is a new opportunity for you to record video in vertical view, and think about the demographics, right? The demographics are going to be younger people who are watching video, vertical video, right? They&#8217;re looking for vertical content, and they&#8217;re consuming that content. And now there&#8217;ll be able to consume vertical video ads from the mobile application environment. So if they have their smartphone, maybe their iPhone or their Android phone and they&#8217;re watching video in vertical, this is a great opportunity because you&#8217;re gonna there&#8217;s not going to be as many of those and not as many people putting ads on them. So, they&#8217;ll probably be underpriced. Ray Sidney-Smith 26:00 A couple of quarters until the big brands and so and so forth, get wise to it and start putting out ads. So if you&#8217;re thinking about it, jump on the the opportunity before it gets too popular. And last but not least within the What&#8217;s New at Google. For the geeks out there, if you have been using Google Analytics and some of the tools within the Google Analytics suite, one of them that has only been available in beta up until now is the Google Data Studio tool. This is a an analysis and visualization tool for a whole bunch of different Google suite of products that has analytics ads, YouTube, analytics, Google Sheets, and a whole bunch of other products and services both within and without Google and now it&#8217;s out of beta, and it&#8217;s available free of charge for everybody, which means that you&#8217;re able to suck in all of this data from different places. Say that you want to pull in some Facebook Insights you want to pull in some Google AdWords. Ray Sidney-Smith 27:00 Google Ads insights, Google Analytics and your email marketing statistics. And now you can pull all of that into Google Data Studio and actually see visualizations so that you can do better analysis and synthesis of that data. It&#8217;s a fun tool to play with. It does take some training and getting used to. But once you do, then can see your data in a much more visual perspective, which will help you make better business decisions. So with that, that closes out this section of the episode for what&#8217;s new at Google. And we&#8217;re going to move on to some miscellaneous I&#8217;m going to talk a little bit about Amazon and they&#8217;re embracing small business some information about some tools that I really like and some updates to those and three different particular resources that I think it&#8217;d be really useful for you and then finally closing out with some discussion of upcoming holidays that you should be paying attention to that will really help small business especially for you know, retail but i think you know, even service providers can Ray Sidney-Smith 28:00 can get real benefit out of out of these holidays. And I will probably talk about them every year because I think it&#8217;s so important. But I wanted to talk about what they are and the dates for this year and how you can get engaged. So let&#8217;s start off with Amazon. Amazon has embraced small business with a new platform called Amazon storefronts. And so Amazon storefronts is basically an online marketplace where you can add products and businesses to hundreds of thousands you know if not almost a million small businesses probably sell on Amazon at any given time. Amazon is giving people the opportunity to get on this new product called storefronts and they fit into this thing called curated collections. So basically, there&#8217;s sections that are either industry or product specific or or holiday specific or otherwise. So that gave some examples of back to school Halloween beauty and grooming pet supplies, home grocery toys, electronics, books, jewelry, and so on, so forth. I think that this is going to be really great. Ray Sidney-Smith 29:00 opportunity for you to get in front of Amazon and bring people to your store. Amazon already has handmade at Amazon, which allows artisans to put their products onto onto Amazon directly. But I think that with storefronts this really opens up to a wider range of of small businesses so I think you should really check it out see if it&#8217;s available to you and there is a link in the trend cast for you to be able to sign up for updates on Amazon storefronts so that when the opportunities arise, you can go ahead and get yourself listed on Amazon storefronts. Next is wave so wave accounting is an application that allows you to do all of your bookkeeping accounting payroll and so on so forth online and there are various competitors out there zero accounting which is x e r o into its QuickBooks is available as an online product as well and multiple other online accounting focused Ray Sidney-Smith 30:00 Software. And so the point is, is that wave just put out a whole new interface. And it&#8217;s really beautiful. It&#8217;s a great interface, the product is mostly free. And so you can you can do all the accounting stuff and and invoicing and so on so forth, is free for invoicing you obviously paying the transaction fee. And that&#8217;s how they get paid for the product, payroll services or a fee based service and so on, so forth. So they, they try to give you the bulk of the tool for free. And then there are these various aspects of the tool that obviously cost but I would check out wave if you just go to wave apps. com and look at the look at the new new product, look at the way in which they&#8217;ve visualized the dashboard and they&#8217;ve made it faster and they also have a marketplace where you can find partners who can help you with various aspects of your accounting so I really like how they&#8217;ve done it and so check it out the new wave so if you go to wave apps.com forward slash rebrand. Ray Sidney-Smith 31:00 You can learn all about the new wave if you&#8217;re already using wave. And if you aren&#8217;t using wave yet, you can check it out and see if it&#8217;s something that you want to do. If you want to bring your accounting software into the into the web environment where the rest of your world maybe then it makes it pretty seamless connects to your bank account and, you know, does all the high level stuff that you would need an online accounting software to do next step are just three different articles that I found that help us go over some of the basics of getting on social media and video marketing. And I just thought they were really useful so I wanted to share them here. One is an article on what are the best times to post on social media in 2019, and they covered Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and they talk about what when are the most notable times for you to post on social media. Now, I preface this with the caveat that I am generally skeptical of these kinds of generalized statistic based times to post Ray Sidney-Smith 32:00 Because every audience is unique, especially local audiences. So if you have a local business, you&#8217;re really going to have to look at the insights to figure this out. But if you have nowhere to start, if you&#8217;re just starting off and you have no idea when to post, these are some good guidelines to get started, then you can double back and look at your data to see when your content is being looked at and engaged with the most and then you want to obviously optimize to post at those times. So for Facebook, they&#8217;re saying the best time is between noon and 4pm and then the next runner up is at 9am. So basically in the middle of the day when people are taking breaks or first thing in the morning when people show up at their their offices presumably best day or days to post our Wednesday Thursday and Friday on Facebook for Instagram Instagrams, a little bit different it&#8217;s 11am to 1pm, so a shorter period of time so it looks like there&#8217;s a smaller window of opportunity there for Ray Sidney-Smith 33:00 Hi engagement and then 2am, so 11am to 1pm and then 2am in your local timezone best days are monday wednesday thursday friday so for some reason Tuesday drop below the the the threshold for engagement rate. But Monday Wednesday, Thursday and Friday on Instagram are the best days to post Twitter noon. That&#8217;s it noon as the best time to post on Twitter. And the runner up for that was 5pm to 6pm. So presumably people finish their their work for the day they leave the office and on their Metro ride or on their way out the office. They&#8217;re catching up on tweets from the day the best days to post on Twitter are when Monday Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, best days to post on Twitter. LinkedIn gives you 5pm to 6pm. So again, more professional networking environments. Ray Sidney-Smith 34:00 So people are finishing their work day and maybe closing out with checking out their, their their feeds on LinkedIn answering messages, LinkedIn messages that might be being sent. And they&#8217;re doing that between the 5pm and 6pm our most, most of the most, most days runners up are between 8am and noon. So people are starting off their days early earlier on social media with LinkedIn. And so between 8am and noon, they are logging into LinkedIn. I&#8217;m presuming to update profiles to read their feeds, potentially doing some LinkedIn networking and so on so forth between those hours, best days to post on LinkedIn our Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. So it seems like the weekends and then monday and friday or not when people are most actively engaged in their kind of work work hats, and so Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday on LinkedIn. So they talked a little bit about time zones here and I would just recommend that you check out the time zone little note here but i think that you know if you&#8217;re posting for multiple time zones Ray Sidney-Smith 35:00 The time zone that is going to have the highest engagement across each of those time zones, and that means you might need to post multiple times. Or you might decide that you want to just post you know, during a time period where where more than one time zone overlaps, and therefore, you&#8217;re going to see the most people in that time zone. But that was a really good article updating you on posting times and days for social media. So that link is in the show notes. Next up is video ad suppressor, which is a tool that is built by Hootsuite for developing ads on various platforms Facebook and Instagram and so on so forth. And espresso put out this article, which are the 16 best video editing apps you must use in Ray Sidney-Smith 35:46 and they talked about some of the statistics of how important video is becoming on the internet and they listed a couple of new applications I had not yet seen. And so I thought it would be good to to share. Ray Sidney-Smith 36:00 Those with you. And that way if you are looking for a video editing application, you can go ahead and do that. So Phil Mora go is a is a video editing app I had not heard of before, but it&#8217;s number one on their list. And so it says it&#8217;s known for its incredible video editing software. And so this the app Fillmore ago is supposed to be really great. You can trim video, create subtitles and text, speed up the content, add filters and add overlays. So it sounds like a pretty full bodied application. It&#8217;s free. But it also has in app purchases, which I&#8217;m presuming upgrade some of the features within the tool. It&#8217;s avail available for both iOS and Android. And then I&#8217;m only going to talk about the next two apps and then you can look at the other 13 applications. But next one is just DOMA just it was a long time application that I&#8217;ve used. And justo is an easy video editor. You can install the app and get get going for enhancing your videos really quickly. So you can Ray Sidney-Smith 37:00 style, you can create all kinds of fun, you know, filters and edit and and publish to your various platforms using Mojo. So it&#8217;s free on both iOS and Android. And there is a business plan that allows you to be able to do more in terms of moving around different segments of video and publishing on different platforms, and so on, so forth. And then their third option is another tool that I actually didn&#8217;t know existed. It was it&#8217;s called Adobe Premiere clip, and it says, you know, obviously put out by Adobe, there&#8217;s a full desktop version, but this app is for mobile, and it allows you to create, edit and share videos as it says. So there are two editing styles you can choose automatic where it automatically tries to generate a great video for you and edits it and publishes a video next is free form which allows you to trim sequence and edit the video manually. So you have two different options there from what I&#8217;ve played around with in the few minutes I&#8217;ve had with it, so Ray Sidney-Smith 38:00 Far looks pretty good, looks pretty solid. And it&#8217;s a free app and you probably don&#8217;t need to upgrade to any of the paid plans. But if you need to, you can obviously upgrade if you need it to do more than what it already does. And if you&#8217;re in the Adobe Creative Adobe cc suite you you probably have access to those features anyway so check out the the link to it if you&#8217;re if you have tried those and you need to find other options maybe you&#8217;re on a specific platform and so on so forth. Go to the link in the show notes. And you can see the other video editing applications that have more bespoke features features that maybe you&#8217;re not in the ones that I just listed. I wanted to close out this episode with a discussion on the four big shopping holidays of the fall that start off kind of the winter holiday season. But these are really important for small business and I want to make sure that you all know about them for this coming season. So they are Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday what they are Ray Sidney-Smith 39:00 Our Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. And that&#8217;s November 23, 2018. Ray Sidney-Smith 39:05 That is then followed by Small Business Saturday, which is a program by American Express. And what they do is they give discounts to consumers and they are enabling small businesses using the hashtag shop small to go out there and engage people to buy from small businesses on Small Business Saturday. Then there is Cyber Monday, which is an online shopping holiday and then Giving Tuesday, which is a charity focused holiday so that people can use their charitable giving dollars for the season on that day. Okay, so there is a link in the show notes to this, but there&#8217;s some information on things you can do to prepare for Giving Tuesday. And I think from a from a business perspective, Giving Tuesday is a great opportunity for you to find a charitable marketing Alliance so that you Ray Sidney-Smith 40:00 You can find stories of people who maybe benefited from the charity and also benefited from your business and telling those cross related stories and getting all of the pieces in place. So that if you want to do some some corporate charity work, maybe you share the Giving Tuesday donor link for a charity of your of your preference on behalf of the business and share that out on Giving Tuesday. This gives you some social good perspective from a branding perspective and goodwill perspective to your community, but also an opportunity for people to potentially buy from you and give a percentage away to the charity of your choice. So people who are shopping maybe on Small Business Saturday letting them know that on Giving Tuesday, you&#8217;re going to be giving away some percentage of those dollars spent at your store to the charity on Giving Tuesday. And now you have a multi staged social media and public relations opportunity campaign. Ray Sidney-Smith 41:00 That you can develop based on using that. So look at the the resource link that I provided in the show notes and think about how you&#8217;re really going to utilize these opportunities for you. They are big shopping, holidays. Obviously, big businesses take advantage of this. But a lot of people want to support small businesses. And this is one way in which you can do that by implementing ecommerce opportunities where people can buy from you online and or come to your store during those time frames in order to patronize the store Small Business Saturday, specifically, you can actually apply to be a neighborhood champion. So if your neighborhood doesn&#8217;t have someone championing your small business community, maybe you will, you can head over to the American Express website. Again, there&#8217;s a link to it in the show notes and you can you can engage with the small business community and be a hub for them there but it&#8217;s as easy as as also applying as a business and if you it doesn&#8217;t matter if you accept American Express or not at your store. There are still ways in which you can Ray Sidney-Smith 42:00 Engage and they give you bags and mats and that kind of thing that you can put out for people to know that you are a small business that they should patronize during Small Business Saturday on November 24 so I just really hope that you take advantage of these great shopping holidays that allow you know people in your community to be able to buy from you and to know that you exist by virtue of the conversation that is already happening around those kinds of holidays especially Small Business Saturday I know the SBA gets involved and doesn&#8217;t quite a bit of promotion and so do the Small Business Development Centers in your regions and that does it that closes out this episode of 009 of weapon beyond cast the state of Small Business Technology sep tember 28 edition thank you so much for sticking around and listening to all of the various happenings that are going on in the small business technology space next week I have a great conversation with Sharon Sobel of picture this video she&#8217;s a video production expert and she&#8217;s going to talk about Ray Sidney-Smith 43:00 Video Marketing and production for small business with me she&#8217;s going to focus of course on the production side I&#8217;m going to talk about the video marketing side. And this is going to be a great rundown for you to understand how to actually get the videos made that are so popular on the web, mobile and social media today. I can&#8217;t wait to hear back from you on this topic because it&#8217;s so important. And I&#8217;m happy to answer questions. So do you have a question? I will be happy to answer those either offline or here on the show. Just go to web and beyond cast.com forward slash contact and go ahead and leave a question there and I&#8217;ll be happy to try to help you out and give an answer. Like I said, you know, if it&#8217;s if it&#8217;s one that needs to be privately responded to, I can do that or we&#8217;ll go ahead and answer that here on the show. Because if you have a question about something, it&#8217;s likely that many people listening will also have that same question. And for those of you who are listening for the first time and you&#8217;ve come across this episode, serendipitously please feel free to subscribe and share with your network whether that be Ray Sidney-Smith 44:00 On cast, we&#8217;re happy to have you here and we&#8217;re looking forward to sharing with you in the future. Thanks for listening to web and beyondcast, where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond. I&#8217;m your host Ray Sidney-Smith. Until next time, here&#8217;s to your small business success on the web and beyond.

Branding 101 for Small Business Welcome to Season 1, Episode 8, Branding 101 for Small Business, of Web and BeyondCast. What is Branding? Why Should Small Business owners care? That&#8217;s the goal of this episode. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://webandbeyondcast.com/008 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) To help answer this question, I have with me today, Reggie Holmes, the owner and Creative Director at Enthuse Creative, a branding and design studio based in the Washington DC metropolitan area. Enthuse Creative specializes in brand strategy, design and management for services-oriented startups, small businesses and professional organizations. Reggie brings 9+ years of strategic thinking and creative talent to the plate for his clients, developing award-winning visual solutions for print and digital media. If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments. So, Reggie, tell us what brought you to branding, strategy and design? What attracted you to this profession? I have always been interested in design, ever since I was a young child. I can remember when I used to design logos and apparel for fictional sports franchises. I have a Fine Arts degree and I appreciate fine art disciplines like drawing and painting, but I am most drawn to commercial art, lines, shapes and how they work with type and text to communicate concepts and ideas. This was solidified for me during a computer graphics class my senior year in high school. I like that design is more geared toward communication than expression. It affects our everyday lives in so many ways, from signage and advertising to almost everything we read each day on paper or screens. What is branding? How should Small Business approach the concept in terms of practicality for their business? Ergo, why should they care? Your brand is in many respects your business’ most valuable asset. Branding is the cumulative entities, identities, expressions and extensions &#8211; all the “touchpoints” that make up that brand. It is all the elements inherent to your business or organization that help distinguish it from anything else. Branding can be thought of in terms of addition (+) and multiplication (x) You are adding individual elements but they will have multiplied effect as they reinforce your brand identity and message across the many platforms/media channels that we have available to us today. Studies show that the average consumer is exposed to up to 10,000 brand messages a day. And as marketers are presented with more and more channels to reach their customers, that number is growing rapidly. Source: “Why Your Customers’ Attention is the Scarcest Resource in 2017” What are the components of a Small Business Brand? Visual Elements (logo, colors, marketing collateral, website, app, signage, retail/point-of-sale) Verbal Elements (tagline, web copy, voicemail/phone greeting, customer service) Tangible v. Intangible (tone, online tech support or phone number, price or no-price) &#8212; Promise/Proposition (identify what brand represents, values, goals) Promote (highlight and reinforce positive qualities) Position (identity strengths/ target audience/demographic/differentiate) Provide (information/context) For the solo entrepreneur, you yourself are the brand, especially early in the beginning while you build. There ought to be harmony and not a disconnection between what you project personally and what your business projects. Everything will create a story that is uniquely yours, language, characters and narrative, therefore it must all be connected and congruous. How can a startup business owner with little to no budget start out branding so that when they are ready to, say, hire you, they’ve not gone down a wrong path? Ask themselves some key questions: Who is my target (Market)? What is my (Message)? What is my (Method)? Begin with a monologue, which will eventually become a dialogue with everyone who engages your business. There is a strong temptation to cut corners – have a strong business plan and many advisors. Strategy precedes design. A strong business plan (including brand/ marketing plan) is a firm foundation upon which to build. Don’t just throw money at the cheapest option. I’ve seen this come back to bite people in some excruciating ways. Mention meeting just the other day. Also, don’t feel like you need to get everything at once. The items you get designed, social platforms you engage on etc. should be good fits for your business. Be wary of anyone trying to sell you what you don’t need. Develop a relationship with a design professional, not unlike a bookkeeper/accountant relationship. If a business has a budget, what should they do before they meet with a designer, if anything? In a word, Research! Come into the conversation with data and questions. Your designer should ask you as many questions as you ask them. Remember, our goal from the creative side is to help you communicate key information about your business so that your potential customers/clients can make a decision to purchase from you. This means my goal is not just creating pretty designs. We’re into communication not just cosmetics. One thing that makes for a great client is the ability to communicate not just what you don’t like, but what you do like and why you like it. Think in terms of investment and value, not just cost and price. Understand where branding fits in terms of where your business organization process is. Don’t do it too soon, don’t put it off and try to do it on the cheap in a haphazard fashion. It needs to be carefully thought-out and executed and the craft of the produced design should reflect that. This is where advice and plan are extremely helpful. What should Small Business startups and owners look for when hiring a branding, design or creative agency to help them build their brand and marketing collateral? A few key things: A firm that will offer you the level of engagement in the creative process that is right for you. How involved do you want to be? A firm that is willing to educate you on their methodology, techniques and process. [Designers] increasingly want to be valued as strategic, creative partners. Make sure you understand their process. They should be able to explain the value they will add through their services. When you see their work, do you see work that represents the level of creativity/skill you require. Do they demonstrate an understanding of your vision and goals. Trustworthy, integrity and honesty &#8211; goes without saying. Someone you would enjoy working with, because hopefully, you’re able to build a long-term partner who will be with you as your business grows! In this Cast &#124; Branding 101 for Small Business Ray Sidney-Smith, Host &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; Reggie Holmes, Enthuse Creative Show Notes &#124; Branding 101 for Small Business Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Rethinking the 4 P’s Understanding the 4C’s of the Marketing Mix Best Tool of the Week &#124; Branding 101 for Small Business Canva Canva Design School Raw Text Transcript &#124; Branding 101 for Small Business Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360d4033" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360d4033" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360d4033" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360d4033" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Reggie Holmes 0:00 I&#8217;m an advocate for anything that helps people develop more of a design language and understanding education. I mean, I don&#8217;t expect people to know what I know. But the more they know about what makes design appealing, attractive, effective, I think it just, it helps everybody. Voiceover Artist 0:22 Welcome to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond with your host re Sydney Smith. Ray Sidney-Smith 0:33 Hello. They&#8217;re small business owners, entrepreneurs and community. Welcome to season one, Episode Seven of web and beyond cast. I&#8217;m a Sydney Smith Today we are going to be talking about branding, one on one for small business and I have the pleasure of having on the show to answer the question, what is branding, how to brand and all of that other important information that small businesses really need to know about caring about nurturing, maintaining, and of course at the start developing a small business brand. I have Richie homes, the owner and creative director of enthuse creative or branding and design studio based in Washington, DC. Welcome to the show, Reggie. Reggie Holmes 1:14 Thank you for having me. Ray. It&#8217;s a pleasure to be on Ray Sidney-Smith 1:17 with you. Wonderful. so enthused creative specializes in brand strategy design and management for service oriented startups, small businesses and professional organizations. And you Reggie bring eight plus years of strategic thinking and creative talent to the plate for your clients. And you&#8217;ve developed award winning visual solutions for print and digital media. Tell me a little bit about what brought you to branding strategy and design What attracted you to the profession of helping businesses create these visual presences ever since Reggie Holmes 1:49 I was a young boy, I have been interested in design before I even knew that it was a career that one could choose. I used to create logos. And I used to design uniforms for sports teams that I made up and I would create the the branding and the apparel design for different franchises that I made up and different sports. And I remember that as a young boy. So I&#8217;ve just always been interested in how colors and type in graphics and symbols work together to communicate ideas to communicate identity for businesses, for sports teams, for organizations. It&#8217;s just something that I&#8217;ve always been interested in. And I took a computer graphics class in high school. And it was then that that was sort of solidify for me as a path that I wanted to go down professionally. I&#8217;ve just been working at it for years. And here I am today. That&#8217;s a Ray Sidney-Smith 2:55 great story of you&#8217;re coming into being as a designer and strategist that&#8217;s really a lot of fun. It&#8217;s for listeners who don&#8217;t know already I facilitate the Alexandria Small Business Development Centers executive Roundtable, the business development roundtable on a monthly basis. That&#8217;s actually where I met Reggie P is a regular contributor there at the business development Roundtable. And so it&#8217;s an it&#8217;s an opportunity for the small business owners in the city of Alexandria and the surrounding areas to come together once a month on a topic of discussion. And so that&#8217;s how you and I have gotten to know each other. Reggie over the years, I get to now ask you all of the questions that we sometimes as small business owners are kind of fearful to ask, because it makes us maybe, perhaps look a little foolish. But I think they&#8217;re really important for small business owners to know these, these these answers and understand them well enough so that they&#8217;re able to make good choices, especially when they&#8217;re startups. But this is really important, actually, when you&#8217;re growing your business as well. You know, so this is really perennially important to a business owner. Reggie Holmes 4:05 How do you define branding? When, when a small business owner comes to and says, Why should I care about a brand? How do you respond? Reggie? The simple answer is your brand is your reputation. It&#8217;s the sum of all the touch points that a customer consumer client would have with your business people think of the logo, the visual brand identity first above, really brand is a lot more than that. And I think that&#8217;s one of the first conversations that you know, I have with a potential client or someone who inquires about branding and what it is that we do with enthuse creative. So it&#8217;s really cumulative, it&#8217;s it&#8217;s not just the logo, that that&#8217;s the most important thing, brand is really a business&#8217;s most valuable asset. It&#8217;s not so much the products and services people are buying the brand, it&#8217;s all the things that are helping to drive that customer decision. I like to think of it as addition and multiplication. So it&#8217;s all the individual elements, the logo, the tagline, the messaging, the marketing, collateral, website, mobile apps, all these things are individual and their their cumulative, but it&#8217;s also it&#8217;s being multiplied as it&#8217;s reinforcing the, your brand identity, your message, you know, nowadays, there&#8217;s so many media channels, there&#8217;s so many platforms, there&#8217;s so much access to brands, more than than certainly at any time that we&#8217;ve been on the earth. And there&#8217;s so much available to a potential client or customers. So all the different touch points that are that are created are having a multiplier effect. It&#8217;s creating an identity for your business. And it&#8217;s visual, but it&#8217;s also verbal. And it&#8217;s also tangible and intangible things that people might not even think about as elements of a brand. It&#8217;s the sum of all those touch points that people have to engage with your organization Ray Sidney-Smith 6:27 right on point. And what I typically talk to business owners, I frequently have to explain this concept to them. And I say, the three major components of a small business brand, which are the written visual and emotional components of the brand. And those three come together. And for the most part, the business owner has control over two of those, the, the way in which they present the business both in written and visual, and then the emotional component is what the customer consumer bring to the experience, it&#8217;s those three big components Reggie Holmes 7:04 is that there&#8217;s influence that the business entity, you know, the business owner has that you bring to it. But a lot of it is what the end user is bringing into it as well. And it sort of begins with a monologue you are articulating, hey, this is who I am. And then when you enter the marketplace, you are then engaging in a dialogue with the customer, the consumer, so they have an opportunity to respond to what you&#8217;ve communicated about your brand, and how it is different. Because ultimately, when we&#8217;re talking about branding, we&#8217;re talking about what is distinguishing you from the other business in your space. That is a similar thing. So as a customer, I need to know what are the elements that set you apart from someone else who may sell a similar product or service, I need to be able to identify that quickly because I&#8217;m being bombarded with branding and advertising and marketing messages all day long from the time I get up to when I go to sleep. So I need to be able to readily identify who you are, what is it you do? What is Ray Sidney-Smith 8:18 the problem that you&#8217;re there to solve, and how do I access your products or services. So those those things need to be communicated through a brand. And the best brands, you know, do that in a way that&#8217;s consistent, that&#8217;s clear. And that&#8217;s creative. This brings us to a natural segue, discussing the components of the brand itself. And for a small business brand, I tend to think of this as a little bit different than, say, corporate brands, although the parts are the same, the way in which small business owners are going to develop and invest in them is very different. Case in point, if you are a startup entrepreneur, and you&#8217;re doing the business on a shoestring budget, the pieces that you develop for the brand are going to be certainly in a different order, and maybe even in the amount of time and thoughtfulness you give to them just because of resource limitation. And if you&#8217;re a well funded small business, and you have that ability to spend both the time and resources be that money and other people involved in development of the brand, then you&#8217;re going to be able to think about some of these other maybe finer tuning of the brand than otherwise, would you agree or disagree, Reggie. And then we can get into some of the particulars of what Reggie Holmes 9:42 what components are there of the brand itself, I think, I would agree, it&#8217;s simply, you know, like you said, a matter of resources. And branding is something that touches the life cycle of every business, every organization at some point point. And so when you&#8217;re first beginning, establishing that, that clear identity and investing in getting the word out about who you are, you know, your resources are better spent doing that as far as building your brand and building a brand awareness and recognition. As you grow and have an established presidents, you can penetrate in some different areas and spin your branding, marketing dollars on different things. So from the day you start your business, it has a brand, let&#8217;s be abjectly clear, Ray Sidney-Smith 10:34 you have a brand from the moment you start your business because it is the impression verbal, visual, emotional or otherwise, that your customers have a view and the business right that&#8217;s right, you&#8217;re now taking charge by as we have this conversation going forward. Now, it&#8217;s about understanding the components and where you can actually put those marketing dollars that Reggie&#8217;s talking about how you can actually impose and start to affect them maturity of the business. And therefore, its goodwill. Typically, in marketing class, we talked about the four P&#8217;s and the four C&#8217;s of branding, right, there&#8217;s product, price, place, and promotion. And then there&#8217;s consumer cost, convenience and communication. But Reggie, you have sort of a different way of talking about the visual, verbal and tangible and intangible elements, as you talked about, in the beginning of the show, can you go over for us what the components are of a small business brand, and which ones they should invest in, in order Reggie Holmes 11:32 at the very minimum, you need a logo that&#8217;s sort of the face of so to speak of your business. So you you need a logo that will help distinguish you as legitimate business entity. And with that you have some colors a type of font a written execution of your brand name and some some marketing collateral, you&#8217;re really sort of depends on the nature of your business. But typically, you are getting started, you have business cards, as you&#8217;re out at different networking events and meeting people just getting the word out about your your business, you have various social media channels that are, are free and available to you. And so that is something that you should definitely take advantage of. And then a website, you need to have a a website that you will be able to drive interested people to, that will give, you know, at the very minimum some information about your products and services. And it needs to obviously be a website that people can can access easily on their mobile devices. If you have a storefront, you want to have some some signage with your visual identity, you want to have retail branding. So everything within your space will be clearly evident. unified as as belonging to the business and all these items needs to be tied together visually, so that people can begin to make those associations as they see your colors in conjunction with your your name written out, and your symbol. And so those are the basic kind of visual elements. Ray Sidney-Smith 13:21 I&#8217;m going to get up on my soapbox here just for a moment for people as my listeners are, are going to become aware of over time, I&#8217;m the host. So I get a chance to step up on my soapbox. But I consistently talk about the idea of a brand enabled business. And that really means making sure that the verbal and written components of the business are solid, right? So it means so we got it sort of backup a little bit and talk about the business name itself, let&#8217;s just take a reality check here. And understand that some business names just should not be they shouldn&#8217;t be in existence. And, and this starts out with the, with the ABC consulting of the world or Smith incorporated Well, we can care about name recognition, many times, businesses are poorly named. And that&#8217;s where brand enable tagline that is that five to eight words, sometimes eight to 12 hours, depending upon how short the words are, and how well they come off your tongue are displayed with that business. So if you&#8217;re ABC consulting, and you&#8217;ve already started your business, and you&#8217;ve been in business for 10 years, and you know, you&#8217;re really looking to up the brand and and Reggie you can, you can agree or disagree with me here. But then maybe a tagline could be a really great addition to the brand so that people can understand what ABC consulting is all about. And, and that really becomes something that leads its way into your as you&#8217;re going to talk about Reggie, you know, web copy marketing, collateral copy, all the things that you&#8217;re going to write about the business are informed from that brand enabled business name and tagline from the web marketing side, I frequently see this as the tagline for frequently becomes the name of a blog, or the URL you use for your website. the.com or, and other kinds of tools that you use over time, I&#8217;ll use I&#8217;ll use myself as an example. You know, we&#8217;re w three consulting if people don&#8217;t really know what w three is, which is, stands for worldwide web, right w to the power of three worldwide web, you&#8217;re not going to understand it. But by using our tagline you now understand, we help small businesses on the web and beyond, right. So it&#8217;s a it&#8217;s about using those pieces, which we then said, Okay, well, let&#8217;s use that web and beyond part because I think that resonates with people over the years, I&#8217;ve found that that resonates with people. So I said, Okay, well, we&#8217;ll take web and beyond and make that the blog. And so that&#8217;s what we did. Now, it&#8217;s become the podcast name, which is weapon beyond cast. So it&#8217;s about using these brain components to help elevate the brand over time with the words and, and I I know that a lot of people jumped to the visuals very quickly. And as Reggie said, your logo is pretty important. It&#8217;s what makes legit, but you really have to think about what you&#8217;re actually what you&#8217;re presenting in words to people, especially the biggest words that people see which is your is your business name, and typically your tagline and URL. So I&#8217;m going to step off my soapbox here, Reggie, you can provide feedback and thoughts there. And and then we can continue with the verbal elements. Reggie Holmes 16:20 Now that&#8217;s a very good point, I&#8217;ll just use myself briefly as an example. My last name is homes. But I didn&#8217;t want to create you know, homes, design group or something like that because for one enthuse is it&#8217;s a fun word to say, it means to fill with joy or happiness. And so for me, as a small business owner, and doing the creative process of making designs of various kinds, like I wanted to communicate how much of a joy it was for me to be doing design. And then I&#8217;m trying to create an experience for my clients. Because there are a lot of people who do design, but I&#8217;m really trying to be focused on the experience that I provide for them. So infuse was a unique word to kind of capture that idea. And then creative, I didn&#8217;t want to just limit myself to graphic design, although that&#8217;s sort of at the heart of what we do. But I&#8217;m really trying to be a brand strategist and eventually a brand manager as small businesses grow. So that all centers around creativity, not necessarily design thinking a few years down the road, to be able to position myself as just a creative services firm. And that sort of incorporates everything that&#8217;s involved in the creative process, from the strategy to their design to the management. So as you mentioned, the, the words that you choose in conjunction with your business are very important. And the visual and verbal must be in concert, if there&#8217;s a disconnect there, they will be confusing for a potential client and, you know, can hurt the business ultimately. So that was a great point, as you mentioned, the tagline that does go into the copy that you choose for your marketing collateral, your website. And even the things that as you get into growing business, where you have employees, and how they respond over the telephone, if people are going to be calling you how they interact with customers, in terms of personal service. So all of these things are speech, their words, but how you go about that, what you choose to say, and how you say, it is a big part of building the verbal aspect of the brand. And then, you know, some of the intangible things like the tone that you use, some business brands are, you know, very witty and pithy, some are more stern and serious, but it all has to correspond to the other elements. And again, it&#8217;s like you&#8217;re creating a life language, and all the different parts of the language have to work together, you know, some, there&#8217;s some businesses, for instance, that they have catalogs, they have products and services that are, you know, they want to position themselves for the every man of the every woman, some are very exclusive, and they&#8217;re there, you have to, you know, look for them, and we have to know where to look for them for their products or services. So, some online businesses have tech support, that&#8217;s only online, you can&#8217;t call and actually speak to a person. But there are some that have a number that&#8217;s, you know, 24 hour number, and they&#8217;re very upfront about, hey, call us anytime, because they&#8217;re trying to, you know, position themselves and their brand based on their level of customer service. So, there&#8217;s many different approaches, it has to make sense for the business that you&#8217;re in, and the market that you&#8217;re trying to reach. Absolutely. And you can, you could take Zappos, the idea of them being very customer focused company, most people think of them customer service first, and shoes second, Ray Sidney-Smith 20:02 and I think that&#8217;s one of those intangibles that people frequently don&#8217;t consider when they think about the goodwill of the company. And by the way, for, for those of you who don&#8217;t know, goodwill is an accounting term. And it&#8217;s the value of the company that people associate with it. So there&#8217;s an actual dollar value to Goodwill, when you sell a company and some of that goodwill could be zero, some some goodwill can be zero, some can be obviously, much more than that you think about the best brands in the world, their goodwill is fairly high, because the name itself is what commands people wanting to come and shop with them. So it&#8217;s really important for you to think about that. And I think that going back to your we&#8217;re talking about sort of phone support, and voicemail greetings and that kind of thing, your phone number is really important. And just from an SEO perspective, Google their local SEO algorithm looks at the phone number for making sure that your businesses located on their Google Maps Engine, you need to make sure that your phone number is localized. But also people create a custom numbers, you know, these vanity numbers that spell out maybe even your business name, or part of your tagline. Or or what your product or services Yeah, there&#8217;s there&#8217;s many approaches, it just has to make sense for who you are, what you do and who you&#8217;re trying to reach. When a startup business owner is just getting started, there&#8217;s little to no budget and they want to be able to hit the ground running, what are some of the things that they should ask themselves? What are some of those key points they should be covering as they&#8217;re making their way through the brand development process? The Reggie Holmes 21:42 first and one of the most important things is that it&#8217;s it&#8217;s not divorced from overall business plan strategy and development process. So it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s, it fits within the the overall business plan and business development process. And it there&#8217;s three really important questions, who is my target? Who is my target market, what is my message that I want to take to that market that informs your method, you know, what is my method that I&#8217;m going to use to reach potential customers or clients in my target market, all those things, again, work together. And I think that it&#8217;s important to think not just it, there&#8217;s going to be a cost involved and I, you know, work with a number of clients, especially in that early stage startup level that are, you know, they&#8217;re very cost conscious. And again, that&#8217;s where working that out with your small business advisor is really important. You, you know, know your budget better than, than anyone else. But it I think it&#8217;s important to think of the branding process in terms of not just cost, but value. And, and I try to have conversation with people that are interested in, in my services in that way, if you think about, you know, creating a strong brand for business, if you have that for 10 years. And in that 10 years, your business grows at a steady rate, you think about, you know, the goodwill, as you mentioned, you think about the reputation that a strong brand helps you to develop and maintain over 10 years, and think about the value that that creates for your business not having to worry about, well, is this is my logo going to be outdated? Is it going to, you know, just not work well, for my business at some point, is it poorly done, or, you know, these types of things. So, creating just a logo, you know, that that is a strong market is successful, and is is active for five to 10 years, just think about the value one that does saves you from not having to revisit the process two years into your business. But also just in terms of reputation, goodwill, recognition and awareness is tremendously valuable. So, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s an investment that is well worth it. And trust me, I&#8217;ve seen, you know, individuals who have cut corners, Ray Sidney-Smith 24:17 they end up paying a lot more in terms of heartache and headache and actual dollars having to revisit the brand because maybe they didn&#8217;t take the necessary time or effort to do it in the beginning, if a business comes in for a consultation, and I see that they&#8217;ve already done some of this, you know, they went on to an online platform, and they got a logo created by by someone, and their business name doesn&#8217;t match the logos color scheme, it doesn&#8217;t match the tone of their customer base, it doesn&#8217;t, you know, it won&#8217;t affect their target market, you know, like having a black and steel and blue colored logo for a home handyman business that caters to women in their 30s, right, you know, it&#8217;s like, those are Harley Davidson slash, you know, kind of financial services, colors, you know, and, and people people don&#8217;t know that. And, and, and it&#8217;s not your fault that you don&#8217;t know that. But now that you&#8217;re hearing this information, you should be very cognizant of the fact that if you&#8217;re starting out your business, you need to build a brand that represents you well, but it needs to purposefully make your potential clients current clients want to hire you, it needs to appeal to them, it doesn&#8217;t need to appeal to you. And, and, and I think that frequently happens, it&#8217;s like, you know, I want I want to have a brand that that is cool for me, especially, you know, like, if you&#8217;re, if you&#8217;re in that mindset of wanting to look cool as a business, but it doesn&#8217;t represent well, to the people who are hiring you, that&#8217;s going to be a real problem. So sometimes those cheaper solutions, those no cost solutions can be can be palatable for some period of time. But at some point, you&#8217;re going to need to have a professional look at that. And, and then you&#8217;ll make the decision whether or not you&#8217;re going to develop a relationship with a designer or some other creative professional to be able to have work, work this out for you, and you&#8217;re in that world. So I want you to be able to give us the best arguments for hiring branding professionals, you know, what, what is the big why, and this comes right back to why you should care and the end. And some of the things that you should pay attention to sort of look out for, that really should be a red flag for a small business owner, to say, that&#8217;s not quite the person I should be hiring. This could be as banal as they just don&#8217;t have my style. They don&#8217;t, they don&#8217;t know what I&#8217;m looking for two things that are more Oh, that person is not reputable. or doing things legitimately. And I should back a little slowly Reggie Holmes 27:02 when it comes to the creative aspects of your business. If you understand how important it is, you know, some of the things that we&#8217;ve talked about today, it&#8217;s, you&#8217;ll recognize that it&#8217;s a valuable investment. And I think that you need to understand sort of what you do well, even in deciding who you&#8217;re going to work with, you need to select someone that sort of understands the the context that you&#8217;re in, that you&#8217;re your business exists, and they don&#8217;t necessarily have to be local. A lot of people have, you know, virtual agencies, and they do great work. But they take the time to understand you to understand your business and understand the market that you&#8217;re in, and that you&#8217;re trying to reach. And again, so it goes back to them asking you key questions, they need to demonstrate a level of investment in your success that, you know, you don&#8217;t necessarily get with someone who&#8217;s not a professional or their job is to just turn out designs. So I think that&#8217;s a key thing that the small business owners should consider. And this is what we do, sort of speaking for people that do this professionally, you need to be able to find someone that can demonstrate the level of craft or skill that you require for your business, they&#8217;re also they&#8217;re willing to include you in the process. But it is not a matter of, they don&#8217;t require you to be heavily involved, because they are creative, they&#8217;re not just going to have one brief conversation with you, and then go off and create designs that are, they&#8217;re not relevant to the context of your business, your market that you&#8217;re in anyone that you would consider hiring for your small business owner, they need to be able to show you representative work that they&#8217;ve done in the past, and, and have some, some evidence present evidence that they&#8217;ve done the type of work of the quality and nature that you would be looking for, and, and be able to provide those references. So you can get all that information before you make a firm decision, Ray Sidney-Smith 29:16 I use frequently the the analogy of being fitted for women for a dress for men for a suit, and how a tailor using sort of works with someone, you know, when you go to a tailor or to address shop, or what or what have you, you go there and they take your measurements, they then have you put on the garment once it&#8217;s in, you know, some final format and they tweak and they help you along the way they see how it fits you. And they asked whether you&#8217;re uncomfortable or comfortable with it. And in that case, you know, in a brand setting, they may you may show that to several customers of your own to see how they respond. You may do focus groups, what have you, and and they they work with you through the process. And I think that, well, fashion professionals are kind of design professional. And, you know, I think it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s kind of the same process. So you need to hire someone who&#8217;s going to going to fit your needs and style for doing that, you know, some people, you know, want to be able to take measurements and then grab their their suit and run out the door, you know, without trying it on, they&#8217;re going to be others who are going to want to come try it on and come in for several different fittings for tweaks and customizations. Right. And, and that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s something that is very personal. And if this is going to be a long term relationship that you have with a design professional, you need to make sure that you pick the right partner, right, because this this becomes an extension of business partnership. And in small businesses, which I frequently find is that your your accountant or bookkeeper, your business counsel, legal counsel, financial advisor, your design professionals, all of the people who are involved, your your office supply vendors, right, you know, all of those people become were big business would have all of those people in house, maybe not your office supply vendor. But everybody else would probably be in house positions you&#8217;d have in house legal counsel, you&#8217;d have an in house CFO, you&#8217;d have all those people, those external people become part of your business by extension, and you need to hire them for that you need to hire them with that, that concept in mind. Well, thank you for that Reggie. I think it&#8217;s always great for people to hear from designers. And to learn a little bit more about branding and strategy and design for small business. So I really appreciate that. This brings us to my regular segment on the show, which is best tool of the week. And so today, I wanted to talk about a design tool since we&#8217;re talking about branding. And the tool that I want to bring to everyone&#8217;s attention, if you haven&#8217;t already heard about it is called canvas. And you can find a link to Canvas in the show notes. But it&#8217;s just canada.com. And and just so everybody knows as well. Anytime you&#8217;re looking something you can always go to web and beyond cast calm forward, slash, the number of the episode and find all the show notes to anything that we&#8217;ve talked about. And I&#8217;ll put some other resources about branding and such there in the show notes for today&#8217;s episode. But back to Canvas. So Canvas is awesome. And Reggie, before we started recording, you told me you knew about Canvas. So you can jump in here if you if you want to add your thoughts here. But Canvas is a design tool. And here at WP consulting, we&#8217;ve actually moved completely to Canvas. So everybody in house uses Canvas, we&#8217;ve gotten rid of the Adobe Suite. I know that&#8217;s probably going to make some of you design folks out there. gasp. But but it&#8217;s true. We, you know, our business clients, they don&#8217;t need it. Canvas is just a great way for us to be able to do it. So what this is what Canvas Canvas is a web based platform. And now they officially have iOS and Android applications. So now you can actually use them both on iOS and Android, as well as on the desktop web desk top version. So it gives you these simple templates for being able to create good design. And further more they actually provide a design school, if you go to design school canvas. com, they give you the tutorials for being able to learn how to use the product to create good design. And while everyone is not a good designer, and not everybody will want to create that design, which is why you would hire design professional. And then they could create those designs for you in Canvas. And then that way you can manipulate them and edit them as necessary. the ease with which you can use Canvas. And the way in which it operates is just phenomenal. And and so there&#8217;s a business version. And there&#8217;s a free version. And so you can check it out. But I have to say I&#8217;ve given it a quite a lot of thought. And we&#8217;ve just decided to move our complete design work to Canada, because it&#8217;s just a great place for us to keep all of our brand assets. And it helps us very, very quickly and easily create visuals for many different environments. But my favorite is the magic resizing feature. And what that does is it takes an image, say, I create a Twitter image, you know, Twitter template, and I just hit the magic resizing tool. And it creates the size images sized for Pinterest and Instagram and Facebook, and so on so forth automatically so automatically knows how to resize and relay out the design for those platforms. So it saves countless hours in redesigning things. So just sort of keep that in mind. Reggie Holmes 34:31 I&#8217;m an advocate for anything that helps people develop more of a design language and understanding and education. I mean, I don&#8217;t expect people to know what I know. But the more they know about what makes design appealing, attractive, effective, I think it just, it helps everybody. Yeah, Ray Sidney-Smith 34:54 I think anything that teaches anybody what kerning is and how to actually place appropriate spaces around objects, and just just proper layout, you know, it&#8217;s a very, very at times complicated process, because it&#8217;s about trying to, like solve a puzzle, you know, designers solve puzzles, you know, it&#8217;s like how to how to place these things in such a way that it communicates a message without it ruining the visual layout, the visual communication process as well as its appeal to people. And, you know, it&#8217;s a very complicated process. And I think that that&#8217;s something that Canvas helps people get a little bit closer to without having to be a designer to get there. So I really like it. And I highly recommend people go ahead and check it out. So thank you again to Reggie homes of enthuse creative for joining me here on today&#8217;s web and beyond cast so you can learn all about Reggie and his work over the enthused creative website that&#8217;s at enthused creative calm and you can of course go to web and beyond cast calm and you&#8217;ll find links to all the things we&#8217;ve discussed here in the show notes today. So again thank you Reggie for joining me here on weapon beyond cast and thanks for having me Ray. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for listening to weapon beyond cast were small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond. I&#8217;m your host re Sydney Smith. Until next time, here&#8217;s to your small business success on the web and beyond.

On this episode, we are going to be discussing a topic near and dear to my heart, and a little bit meta, podcasting for Small Business; more specifically, the business case for podcasting. And, more importantly, why should you start a podcast for your business? And, to do that, I’m letting the cat out of the bag here with my co-author of our forthcoming book, Podcasting for Small Business, Steve Orr. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://webandbeyondcast.com/007 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, Business Case for Podcasting, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or contact us. In this Cast &#124; Business Case for Podcasting Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Steve Orr is the founder of Steve Orr Media, which helps clients create and produce podcasts, as well as become more effective speakers. He has worked with a variety of small and large clients, including self-employed professionals, neighborhood business improvement districts, and Fidelity Investments. Steve launched his consulting business after an award-winning broadcasting career. As a business news anchor and feature reporter, his stories for the MarketWatch Radio Network were heard regularly on some of the country’s biggest news stations. Steve has interviewed hundreds of people over the years, including CEOs, celebrities, athletes, and public officials. Ella Fitzgerald, Mickey Mantle, and then Israeli U.N. Ambassador Benjamin Netanyahu were among his most memorable. In Steve’s free time, he writes screenplays and radio plays (and voices the characters). He’s also a big fan of comedy improv. Show Notes &#124; Business Case for Podcasting Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Dr. Robert Passikoff, Brand Keys Lou Kastelic, JD, MBA, Jordan-Crandus, PA Sign up to learn about when Steve and I launch our book, Podcasting for Small Business. How to Value a Podcast Best Tool of the Week &#124; Business Case for Podcasting Podcast Advertising Resource: WhyPodcasts Raw Text Transcript &#124; Business Case for Podcasting Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360d6813" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360d6813" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360d6813" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360d6813" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > 0:00 Welcome to web and beyond cast were small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond with your host re Sydney Smith. Hello there small business owners, entrepreneurs and community Welcome to season one, Episode Seven it&#8217;s double oh seven Episode 007 of web and beyond cast I&#8217;m racing Smith on this show we are going to be discussing a topic near and dear to my heart and a little bit meta podcasting for small business and more importantly, why you should start a podcast for your business or at least get into the podcast game you could do more than just launched a podcast and to do that I&#8217;m letting the cat out of the bag here a little bit with my co author of our forthcoming book podcasting for small business. Steve or Steve is the founder of Steve or media which helps clients create and produce podcasts as well as become more effective speakers. He has worked with a variety of small and large clients, including self employed 1:00 professionals, neighborhood Business Improvement districts or what are called bids and Fidelity Investments. Steve launched his consulting business after an award winning broadcasting career as a business news anchor and feature. Reporter his stories for the Market Watch Radio Network were heard regularly on some of the country&#8217;s biggest news stations. Steve has interviewed hundreds of people over the years, including CEOs, celebrities, athletes and public officials and Steve&#8217;s free time. He writes screenplays and radio plays and voices, the characters he&#8217;s also a big fan of comedy improv. Welcome to web and beyond cast. Steve Ray, thanks so much. Pleasure to be here with you today. Pleasure to have you. And it&#8217;s really exciting to kind of let everybody know what we have been working on with regard to podcasting for small business. I&#8217;m looking forward to the book coming out for everybody very soon. And I thought it&#8217;d be really fun for us to talk about something that is really important, which is the business case for podcasting. I think a lot of businesses don&#8217;t understand what podcast 2:00 Are and also how to get in the game, right? It&#8217;s trending. It&#8217;s out there. People know that it&#8217;s important to get the word out about your business. And they think of it as a lot of work. And they don&#8217;t necessarily know what the return on investment is going to be for it. And so let&#8217;s start off with what a podcast really is. And then we&#8217;ll get into why businesses should podcast. So what&#8217;s a podcast coming from a radio background? I think the simplest description of a podcast is think of it as radio on demand. And what I mean by that is that you can listen to a podcast anytime from start to finish. You can listen to it at any place, you could listen to it on your PC, in your car on your smartphone. So that&#8217;s that&#8217;s what I mean. But and when I talk about the on demand factor, of course, it is slightly different than radio in that it is a digital 3:00 file as opposed to going out on the airwaves that you would for traditional radio, I would only add to it that people understand that podcasting can be streamed online, you know, via many different digital devices from your desktop computer, to mobile, you know, laptop to mobile devices, like your smartphone and tablets. And the the, the traditional benefit of a podcast over radio is that you can download it offline and take it with you. It&#8217;s a mobile digital radio platform if you want to think about it that way. But it&#8217;s capable of letting you create the programming of your audio life of your audio experience throughout your day. And I think that&#8217;s that&#8217;s the most powerful differentiator for podcasts over any other platform. You You can&#8217;t watch a video and go for a run or watch a video and drive or at least you shouldn&#8217;t. 3:51 In the case of podcasting, you could do that you can drive and listen to a podcast and its content that is tailored specifically to your needs. 4:00 And once because you get to choose the podcasts that you listen to. So with that, why should businesses really podcast or at least get in the podcast world? I want us to talk about four kind of big umbrella constructs. And we&#8217;ll go through these throughout the episode. Just so everybody listening has an idea. I want to talk about the marketing component marketing and branding for podcasting. I want to talk about its return on an investment in terms of dollars spent in marketing just as a general construct, not not in terms of specific numbers, the sales and and lead generation components of podcasting. And then finally, the business valuation, you know, podcast has a a number of value associated with it. That is a part of your business&#8217;s bottom line in some way shape or form whether during the businesses life or when you go to sell it I&#8217;ll talk a little bit about that as well. So Steve, let&#8217;s let&#8217;s start off with the the marketing component of it. What is the marketing value of a podcast? I think what a lot of people 5:00 trying to decide how valuable can the podcast be to your marketing. Now, I would first argue that when you&#8217;re thinking about starting a podcast for your business, sure you&#8217;re in the business to make money so it&#8217;s understandable you&#8217;re going to be asking whether a podcast is going to add to your bottom line but from a marketing and extending your marketing and branding look at it that way. Look at it as an extension of your marketing and your branding for your business. It gives you an opportunity to go out on so many different channels. You may have a blog your website you may have some video about your business out there you may be advertising via Facebook, Instagram, you may be doing some stuff via Snapchat you have so many different channels. So why not exploit podcasting as another channel to get your messages out about your business and give your customers and your clients and would be clients 6:00 Some value. So think of it from that perspective is that it just, it gives you another channel to get your messages out there. And another benefit of podcasting as an extension of your marketing and your branding, when you do a podcast episode, you can turn that into a blog, it&#8217;s very easy to turn that into a blog. And also that adds another channel to getting your messages out there about your business and the value you offer your customers and clients. One of the things that I I frequently don&#8217;t talk about, but I think it&#8217;s also important for us to to, to kind of note here is that you can advertise on other podcasts. And that&#8217;s an extension of your marketing. So if you have the budget for advertising, there are many different types of advertising and so you can put in a spot put in pre roll mid roll or enroll into another person&#8217;s podcast and you pay them for that and then that in essence becomes a part of your marketing you can advertise on the web. 7:00 site of the podcast because the podcasts and other person&#8217;s podcast has a website, you can have them write blog posts on their podcast about you. They can send email to their email listeners, all kinds of ways in which you can use advertising to be able to get out the marketing message for your business without you actually launching a podcast itself. So don&#8217;t don&#8217;t think that you have to necessarily launch a podcast just because, but you do need to be in the podcasting game. You know, this is really important for people to recognize the importance of it. So let&#8217;s let&#8217;s move on to the return on investment for dollars spent in marketing, not just from an ROI perspective, which is return on ad spend, how many how much money you&#8217;re spending on advertising. Steve, from your perspective, what do you think about the long term investment value of a podcast and we can have a little bit of discussion about that here in the immediate podcasts are an important factor in driving engagement for your business. We had a chance to talk to Dr. Robert pass it coffee is 8:00 The president and founder of the consulting firm brand keys, and they analyze brand customer loyalty and engagement. So what he told us is what I had said, you know, podcasts, they helped drive engagement because as consumers, we can look to alternate communications formats such as Facebook, Instagram, for instance before will visit a brand&#8217;s website. But they are entertaining and informative, they can help supercharge your engagement. So once you have that engagement, that&#8217;s the critical part to leading to your return on investment and ultimately your bottom line. So I think you have to start there before you even look at the long term benefit. Thinking with the end in mind is is always an important factor when it comes to small business marketing. If you think that you have a sustainable small business, I think it&#8217;s important for you to think about your marketing sustainability as well. If you&#8217;re thinking about your marketing sustainability, a podcast itself allows you to be able to set up and an ongoing consistent content 9:00 structure so that it fits within your content strategy. And now you have a platform on which you can consistently be speaking to your target audience. And I think that&#8217;s really important for being able to create loyalty, brand awareness and many other the components of marketing that really sets you up for long term success. And so, yeah, podcasting isn&#8217;t going to immediately start sales coming through the door. But if you set it up and you&#8217;re consistent about it, and you keep developing a better podcast which is what what I&#8217;m doing here you know, this is our seventh episode on weapon beyond cast. And I&#8217;m hoping that over time I get better at doing this podcast, which means that I&#8217;ll be able to share more and better content continue to bring great guests on and that over the long term is going to make me a better business owner. There&#8217;s a real value in that that I don&#8217;t think people can identify a specific dollar value to the 10:00 The importance of getting up to the microphone, whatever the frequency is that you need to, to be able to record a podcast and put it out there to the world. And you become a better business person, by the value of being a better communicator, being a better socialiser with your audience. All of those things are values that you need to really take into account when you&#8217;re launching a podcast. One of the other benefits that in addition to extending your branding and your marketing is that you can help create a thought leadership aspect of your business. Either you as the CEO or whomever you are within your business or, you know, to the outside world you can become the go to folks for that particular niche in the business world. And that can have you know that it&#8217;s hard. It is very hard to put $1 amount to your podcast. You could go on other podcast as an expert, you could be called in from the media. somebody knows that you have a podcast out there you are in 11:00 interviewed through the media that can help get your name out there. So it does have other impacts that again, don&#8217;t necessarily translate immediately to $1 amount, but could in the long term lead to your bottom line. That&#8217;s actually something that&#8217;s happened to me that people invite me to become a podcast. Guest because they know that I have a podcast, they know I&#8217;m ready. 11:28 I&#8217;m capable of being interviewed right now, today, you know, when someone needs to get somebody as a guest on a podcast in my, my other podcast, you know, they know that I&#8217;m, 11:38 I&#8217;m ready to go. So when the media calls I&#8217;m ready because they know having listened to me already that I&#8217;m capable of being set up for those. So I&#8217;m much more likely to be called by the media than someone who is not broadcast ready. Absolutely. You really do have to think about that because, you know, certainly from a media perspective, and as you mentioned up front, you know, I&#8217;m a long term media guy. 12:00 I the interviews that we did, if it was the first time we reached out to somebody, and that person wasn&#8217;t very good, that&#8217;s the last. That&#8217;s the last time. But if they&#8217;re good, you&#8217;re going to go back to that person repeatedly over the years. So it makes sense. So this takes us on to the discussion of sales. And I&#8217;m curious, before we started recording, we actually had a discussion about this, that I have a perspective that probably is a little bit more controversial than than the average supporter of podcasts. What, what do you say to the idea of sales in podcasting for a business podcast? You know, as a small business owner? I have a podcast, I&#8217;m putting it out there. How should we approach sales? One of my biggest pet peeves about podcasting right now are the podcasters who start out and they go through all their sales pitches. They go through all their commercials they go for 13:00 One podcast in particular, that was about 13 minutes before I got to the content of value to me as a listener, that to me just completely turns me off to listening to the podcast. I want my value up front. Now, if you are going to be sponsored, let&#8217;s say are you do you want to make a brief pitch, make it really brief. This podcast is brought to you by read, you know, something for five or 10 seconds. I believe that if you are going to do it, do it your call to action, which is how you want people to use your business. Let&#8217;s say for lack of a better phrase, 13:35 save that for the end and that be your call call for action at the end of your podcast. Don&#8217;t be so over and I think one of the interesting lines that Dr. Passive cough said to us from brand keys was that he believes a podcast can only help a company&#8217;s brand if it uses effective storytelling. It isn&#8217;t seen as to commercial or salesy business. 14:00 need to have not just a content strategy, a awareness of the content strategy and where the podcast fits into it, because that that is just up, it could be your platform for one type of content. But then you need to be able to know how to spread the message. Because then, you know, if a tree falls in the forest, nobody hears it kind of sits in that scenario. The reality is, is that you also have to have a sales strategy. And this is the importance of in my first book, so almost success. I talked about the idea that if a business doesn&#8217;t have a sales converting website, they&#8217;re going to fail in almost any other kind of outward facing marketing, whether that be social media, you know, marketing, mobile, marketing or otherwise, no difference with podcasting, your business needs to have a call to action from the podcast to your website or blog or whatever landing page you want to send people to but you need to be able to create value in the content such that people want to be able to check you out they want to be 15:00 Be able to learn more from you. That could mean you providing more value to them typically was what we call a lead magnet on your website. So if you&#8217;re doing those things, as long as you understand that your your website needs to be able to have an appropriate sales strategy and sales mechanism in place, then you&#8217;re left on your podcast to just producing substantive, fantastic quality content for your listeners. For me, the podcast is not the place to sell your business. The podcast can help your business if you direct people to the right channels to help your business rather than being so overt within the podcast for it. I wanted to move us along in the discussion as as we as we come up on our time together, Steve, which is to talk about business valuation. I think many times when we consider podcasting, we always think about the upfront costs and the ongoing costs of of producing a podcast but we actually don&#8217;t think about the back end value of the podcast. 16:00 itself. So we know that we are starting or running a business. And we now want to have a podcast. And so we launched a podcast. But at some point in the future, you&#8217;re going to end your podcast and probably end your business, or you&#8217;re leaving your business, whether it be in a casket or by sale, you&#8217;re going to leave your business, 16:21 not to be gloomy. But I hope you have a good run and you have a wonderful business, but then you are going to have to leave it is no question about it that you&#8217;re going to leave it at some point. So what is the value of a podcast when you do leave it and there&#8217;s some there&#8217;s an importance to starting a podcast if you know what it&#8217;s going to be worth if you&#8217;re consistent about about doing it. So who do we look to for that? Well, we did speak to Lucas stellick he&#8217;s the president of the consulting firm Jordan Crandall. And that firm focuses on mergers and acquisitions for for small to mid sized businesses, Ray and 17:00 loot did tell us that there&#8217;s no doubt there&#8217;s clear value for a business to have a podcast though right now he does say that figuring that out is 17:11 is difficult because it&#8217;s so new for the appraisal business but before we talk to the end result bottom line I did want to mention one thing that lewd told us that I think is critical when it comes to trying to get a sense of your return on investment from your podcast and one of the things that he did tell us is that it is imperative that you ask new customers what prompted their business and why do you do that and that&#8217;s to get a rich sense of your return on investment Lou says is is critical of course and to keep track of the business generated from those who say they listened to your podcast is critical. So in order for you to you know, go down the line and when we&#8217;re talking the end result you need to be in the present. 18:00 In the immediate and keeping track of that business generated from the podcast, and that will only help you by the time you get to that, that end point, especially if you have a business where you have walked in traffic for walking retail traffic, whether your service or product based business, you do really need to be asking people how they found you. And the great part about if you have any transactional business that happens on your website, you&#8217;re capable of usually tracking the connection between the two by either having some kind of modal survey that says How did you find us and in that in that survey question people can say well I I listened to your podcast or you know, I heard you on this particular episode, give people the opportunity to be able to tell you how they&#8217;re finding you and that will help you double down on the marketing efforts that are working and the ones that are not in terms of the of the end result and that&#8217;s if you are eventually going to sell your business or you have you know, you have an offer or whatnot. I think what was interesting 19:00 That Lou said to us Lucas delic said to us is that he thinks or any actually believes that a podcast can be a little icing on the cake for a buyer especially a strategic buyer. Now if that buyer let&#8217;s say is in your field or wants to get into your field loot told us that in existing podcasts could get the buyer more motivation to buy your business and that ultimately motivation is the you know, drives that ultimate offer that a buyer makes. So yes, bottom line 19:35 the bottom line of the bottom line it&#8217;s so to speak is that in the end, the podcast get there&#8217;s value. When we think about businesses, buying businesses and mergers and acquisitions, we we leave out the fact that these are humans doing the interaction and until until the robots are buying and selling businesses for us humans are still involved in that means human motivations really matter and so something like a podcast could be a real 20:00 motivator to someone who wants to enter a market so definitely consider that I wanted to just shift gears a little bit I know this this is probably a little bit up tues but I think it helps give some relative understanding about the value of podcast by looking at the podcast revenues of some of the top podcasts that exist now these are podcasts that they themselves are businesses they are in essence their own programs generating their own revenues from podcasting itself typically from advertising revenue so there&#8217;s an article and I&#8217;ll link to this in the show notes called How to value podcast and from micro cap CO and what they&#8217;ve done is they&#8217;ve given Smart Passive Income eo fire Entrepreneur on Fire and gimlet media as the three examples and so they have their average annual revenues set at 1.7 million 3,000,007 million dollars respectively. So that gives them an ultimate valuation of being $9.4 million, $5.5 million and 21:00 $30 million. Now, there&#8217;s a lot of math that went into how this all worked, assuming, you know, appropriate corporate tax rates, discounting and otherwise on advertising, broadcasting and entertainment. But the reality is, is that these top podcasts have solid businesses with solid revenues because they&#8217;re doing things correctly and you can to that doesn&#8217;t mean that your business is going to be solely based or valued on the podcast itself. But when we talk about the businesses value if you&#8217;re doing all the right things associated with a podcast, you can somewhat use the advertising revenue model for valuing the business podcast and to things as a part of the actual and and Lou when we talked to him talked about the fact that a podcast is a part of intellectual property in his eyes You know, I tend to think of it as marketing right and and so therefore you know, I I&#8217;m curious, we will be talking soon with an accountant and where where they kind of fall on these things when you think 22:00 About a podcast in terms of its actual revenue generation potential, then it has a real value. And so just give that some consideration as you as you make your way forward in terms of how, how much and how many clients will you convert from your podcast. And as you get to know that number better by podcasting, you get a better idea about its value to your business. And there are intangibles that you just you need to have in terms of your business that don&#8217;t necessarily translate to dollars. Absolutely, absolutely. So this brings us to the best tool of the week. Steve. So every week I have this short segment where we talk about the best tool of the week and I am offering up a tool called it&#8217;s actually a website so you know, go figure, but it&#8217;s a website called why podcast.org and you can find the link to it in the show notes and why podcast.org is a way in 23:00 You can learn about the various values of podcasting through advertising. And we talked about this at the top of the show. And there&#8217;s a bunch of research. So it gives you demographics about podcast audience. It gives you different types of podcast advertising categories, it gives you benefits. It shows you how podcasting advertising works. It just is a really great tool for being able to understand the different pieces of the puzzle when it comes to going out there and saying, okay, I want to do some advertising. How does this all work in the podcast space? So I just thought it would be a useful tool for some of you who might think that you&#8217;re not ready yet to launch a podcast but you may want to put some ad dollars into the into podcasts that already exist and you want to seek out those podcasters who are doing that so why podcasts.org alright Steve, this closes out our episode thank you so much for joining me here on 24:00 weapon beyond cast Ray Thanks for having me. It&#8217;s been a pleasure. So that&#8217;s Steve or of Steve or media and you can find his information again in the show notes and links to his website and so on so forth. Steve will be joining me here for other episodes of web and beyond Casper will be talking about executive communications, public speaking and so on, so forth. Other other kinds of areas on which Steve is my go to expert. And so again, thanks. Thank you, Steve, for joining me here on web and beyond cast. That brings us to the end of this episode of weapon beyond cast. What we hope you got from today&#8217;s episode is that there are different ways in how podcasting is really valued and valuable to your small business. Think about the different angles from which you should look at the value of podcasting and then you can decide whether podcasting is right for your business and we will talk to you next week when I have Reggie Holmes. 25:00 enthuse creative on the show to talk about branding. And we will cover small business branding as a general construct and what businesses should really think about when it comes to approaching branding and design professionals to market their businesses. Alright folks, thanks for listening to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond. I&#8217;m your host re Sydney Smith. Until next week, here&#8217;s to your small business success on the web and beyond.

Welcome to Season 1, Episode 6, Search Engine Optimization, of Web and BeyondCast. We have an exciting season in store for you, so I hope you enjoy the time we&#8217;ll be spending together. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://webandbeyondcast.com/006 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) This is just the beginning of Web and BeyondCast, but you have reached the end of our initial series, How to Build a Website. If you haven’t yet listened to the first four episodes on How to Build a Website, I highly recommend that you hop back to the Episode 002 in the podcast feed (which is part 1 in the series) and give those a listen. In this episode, I’m going solo here to explain to you the importance of making your site friendly and accessible to Search Engines (namely Google), so that you can get human eyes on your fledgling Small Business website. I’m going to cover general Search Engine Optimization techniques, then touch on some of the important concepts you need to understand so that you are able to work on Local, Mobile and Social Search Engine Optimization yourself and/or with your Web designer/developer as you near launch of your website. If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast &#124; Search Engine Optimization Ray Sidney-Smith Show Notes &#124; Search Engine Optimization Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Webinars on SEO Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide Check AdSense banned domains: http://bannedcheck.com/ Google Analytics Google Search Engine Console Google My Business Local Listing Ninja Yext BrightLocal Getting Google Reviews (and Responding to Google Reviews) Yelp Google Mobile Readiness and Test My Site Open Graph Test BONUS: Small Business SEO Checklist  Additional Resources SEO &#38; Marketing Tactics to Rank Outside Your Local Area &#124; Webinar WPSSO Schema JSON-LD Markup – Structured Data, Rich Snippet, Google Rich Cards, Pinterest Rich Pins &#124; WordPress.org WP SEO Structured Data Schema &#124; WordPress.org Best WordPress Schema Plugin &#124; WP SEO Structured Data Schema Pro How to Use B2B SEO to Generate High-Quality Leads 10 Tips to Get More Local Customers from AdWords &#38; Facebook Ads Testing the WordLift Artificial Intelligence SEO Plugin &#124; Elegant Themes Blog 💬1 &#8211; 🥇 The SEO Tool For Leaders &#124; Create a FREE account now The essential small business website checklist &#124; Econsultancy A Simple SEO Checklist for Small Business Websites &#8211; ESPRESSO.digital Small Business Website Checklist: What You Need Lined Up Before Going Live The Small Business SEO Checklist &#124; SEO Mark Keeping up with SEO in 2018: What you should focus on How To Optimize For Facebook Graph Search: SEO Meets Social Graph Search Optimization: The New SEO and What it Means &#8211; Adweek Is Your Facebook Graph Search Plan Ready? &#124; HuffPost 7 Key Ways to Optimize Facebook Fan Page SEO (along with Mozinar &#8230; Facebook Graph Search https://www.oncrawl.com/oncrawl-seo-thoughts/what-you-need-to-know-about-open-graph/ https://yoast.com/advanced-technical-seo-social-image-ogimage-tags/ https://opengraphcheck.com/ Raw Text Transcript &#124; Search Engine Optimization Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360d88de" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360d88de" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360d88de" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360d88de" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Voiceover Artists 0:00 Welcome to web and beyond cast where of small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web. And beyond. With your host Ray Sidney-Smith. Ray Sidney-Smith 0:11 Hello, their small business owners, entrepreneurs and economic development agents. Welcome to Unknown 0:14 season one, Episode Six Ray Sidney-Smith 0:17 of web beyond cast, we have an exciting season in store for you. So I hope you enjoy the time will be spending together. This is just the beginning of web and beyond cast. But you have reached the end of our initial series how to build a website. If you haven&#8217;t yet listened to our first four episodes on how to build a website, I highly recommend that you hop back over to episode to episode 002 in the podcast feed, which is part one in the series of the five part series and give those a listen in order. In this episode, I&#8217;m going solo here to explain to you the importance of making your site friendly and accessible to search engines, namely Google so that you can get human eyes on your fledgling small business website, I&#8217;m going to cover general search engine optimization techniques, then touch on some of the important concepts you need to understand so that you&#8217;re able to work on local mobile and social search engine optimization yourself and, or with your web designer developer, as you near launch of your website, what I&#8217;m going to first do is kind of define search engine optimization, what I&#8217;ll call SEO From now on, and why it matters. And then we&#8217;ll talk about positioning, optimizing and monitoring yourself on Google through generalized SEO, local, mobile. And then social search, what is search engine optimization, what is SEO, in the context of your small business website, when you&#8217;re launching a new website, you really want to start to get found by the various search engines. What it is, is the process of making yourself more appealing to search engines. Now search engines, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and all of the other search engines that exist in the world, they are servers that have software were that go out there and look at the various websites that exist out there on the World Wide Web. And when they do that, they are looking for certain factors that indicate to them that your content is relevant to the people who are coming to their search engines to find things out there on the web. So in a lot of ways, while your website may exist on the World Wide Web, it doesn&#8217;t really exist to people unless it&#8217;s actually found via search engines, because that&#8217;s the that&#8217;s the primary access point for so many people, when they go ahead and are looking for something on the World Wide Web, what you do is the you actually have to optimize on up multiple different layers of your website, so that you can be found through what we called SEO. And this is the idea of changing the way in which your website is published, so that it is more appealing to those search engines. that&#8217;s it in a nutshell. So let&#8217;s start off with kind of the top line thing that you need to do. And we&#8217;ll work our way down. And again, this conversation is really to give you an overview so that you can get comfortable with the with the concepts and then what will happen is at the end, I&#8217;ve got a little giveaway for you so that you can go ahead and take this information and make it much more actionable. First and foremost, you got a domain at some point in the process of getting ready to launch your website. Or if you&#8217;re thinking about launching your website, you&#8217;re thinking about domain names. And I&#8217;ve done a couple of webinars on search engine optimization, and domains. And I&#8217;ll put a link to that in the show notes. And again, I&#8217;m going to be talking about a lot of different things today. And all of the links are there in the show notes. So you can hop over there to web and beyond cast calm forward slash 006, and you&#8217;ll be able to find all the links to everything that I&#8217;m talking about. So don&#8217;t you worry. So one of the first things that you&#8217;ll want to do is you want to check that your domain is currently being indexed if your website already exists. But if your website doesn&#8217;t already exist, then when you do this, you may find nothing. If your website does exist, and you don&#8217;t find anything, then that&#8217;s probably an indication that you haven&#8217;t been indexed by Google and or you have been banned one really great resource to start with. And as I said, All these things are linked to in the show notes is Google&#8217;s search engine optimization SEO Starter Guide. And what it does is it goes over some of the basics of what you&#8217;ll need to do in order to be able to be found. So if this discussion wasn&#8217;t hard enough, you can head over to the Starter Guide, and it will walk you through, you can print it out. And you can go ahead and review the glossary of terms and really dig into some of the deeper things here, what I&#8217;m really talking to you about is the idea of launching the site. And hopefully you&#8217;re using WordPress or another website builder that is going to be doing a lot of this heavy lifting for you. And you&#8217;re just checking to make sure that these things are being done so that your site can be found by Google and the other search engines if you want to roll up your sleeves and, and work with a web designer, do some of this stuff under the hood. That&#8217;s great. There are more resources for you there in the SEO Starter Guide from Google. So go check that out in the show notes. What we have here is the necessity for you to be able to make sure that your domain is either going to be indexed and hasn&#8217;t been banned by Google in some way, shape, or form one. One way that you can test this is by going to band check. com ba n Ed ch. e k.com and seeing whether or not Google has banned you from AdSense, which is their publisher monetization platform. And it&#8217;s not a definitive but if someone has been doing some bad things on your website, before it was your domain name, then its potential that it&#8217;s been banned by AdSense. So it&#8217;s one way that you can look for that kind of material. I want to cover just the basics of SEO for you so that you have a strong understanding of how to either know what to look for when you move forward with your own website launch, or at least knowing the right questions to ask of your web designer and developer as you are working with them to get it launched. Or if you&#8217;re using a website builder, like Squarespace, as we talked about in past episodes, we can go ahead and ask the website builder platform, you know, ask their customer service and technical support are these things being done so that you&#8217;re able to better make informed decisions and informed queries about what needs to happen SEO wise, let&#8217;s just start off with Google, right, Google is a behemoth in the market, because they dominate most of they, they dominate the lion&#8217;s share of traffic, both desktop and mobile that&#8217;s being driven to websites. So we want to really pay attention to what we&#8217;re doing, I always recommend that businesses start out with the the two basic tools of optimizing their website. One is actually a data traffic tracking tool. One is actually a data tracking tool, Google Analytics, and I&#8217;ll call it GA, from now on ga allows you to be able to put a little bit of code on your website. And then it starts to help you understand who is visiting your website, and how they&#8217;re interacting with your website. This will help you make more informed decisions as you move forward in optimizing your site in the future. So it&#8217;s not going to do anything for you now. But it&#8217;s really best for you to be able to set it up now, so that you can start tracking that data as soon as possible so that you can learn from it and optimize your website over time. Next up is Google Search Console. Google Search Console, is Google&#8217;s way of showing you how Google sees your website. So what happens again, is you put a little bit of code, or you verify your website against Google Search Console, which you get to by going to google.com forward slash webmasters. And again, links to all this in the show notes. When you go to Google Search Console, it will tell you what it has indexed, what it hasn&#8217;t indexed about your site by submitting what&#8217;s called a sitemap. So your website needs a sitemap make sure that you go out there and get your site map, your designer developer, your website builder or otherwise should be producing that site map. If not, then you need to figure out how to get one created. And then you will then submit that to Google Search Console. And then it will start to send you information. Now Google Search Console does a whole bunch of other really great stuff. It tells you if there&#8217;s for some reason your site is down, it can, it can send you a notification, it tells you if there&#8217;s malware on your site, it can analyze your site and send you those kinds of notices, so that you&#8217;re able to better manage your website and stay abreast it. I know that a lot of small business owners publish their websites, and then don&#8217;t visit them frequently. And you should. But knowing reality Google Search Console gives you that ability to be able to direct you back to the search console and to your website to check out things if something does go awry. Those two tools are just really requisites, set them up, get your sitemap published, and really get going. One of the other things in Google Search Console is the ability to to manage and review what&#8217;s called your robots. txt file. Now, as its name might imply to you. A dot txt is just a simple text file that sits inside of the root of your website. So that is the main folder where your website is public, to the world to the World Wide Web. And this robots. txt file actually tells a search engine when it comes to your website, what it should look at it what it shouldn&#8217;t look at. Now, sometimes when you are developing a website, it&#8217;s forgotten the designer developer or whatever you&#8217;re using. Or if you&#8217;re di wiring, it just doesn&#8217;t get done, you need to make sure that you have a robots. txt file. And you just do that by going to your domain. com forward slash robots. txt. And you can also see this in the search console and make sure that the right things are being seen and not being seen. For example, you might not want at admin pages on your website being published to the search engine. Or you may decide that you don&#8217;t want other things to be shown. Now, this is not for security purposes, you can&#8217;t you shouldn&#8217;t restrict things where you want it to be secure. If you don&#8217;t want it to be on the web, don&#8217;t put it on your website. If you want it to be secure, you should put it behind some kind of authentication protocol. And you should talk to a designer developer to make that happen. This is just for things that you just really don&#8217;t want indexed by the search engine necessarily. But you do want to be available on your website. So say, if you have something that you put up on your website, and you want to share that with a select group of your clients, but not with people who just generally visit your website, you would go ahead and make sure that that was no followed. And you do that through the robots dot txt. So those are some just general things that you need to do on a website level, sort of a macro level when it comes to the website. We will then now drill down to some of the more important local website items more generalized and local website items that I think are really important. As you&#8217;re developing your site, you really need to think about the search keywords and phrases your customers will use on Google and the other search engines to find your business. This list of search keywords and phrases can be general industry or product or service related terms. Or if your are a local business, then those terms will be localized, there&#8217;ll be local search keywords and phrases, the difference would be you selling a product that you can buy anywhere, versus a product or service that you want someone to come into for retail traffic, that is dentist in Brooklyn, New York, or birthday cards in Brooklyn. Those are terms where people know that it&#8217;s a localized search, and you want to be able to drive someone locally in person to that destination to that retail space or service provider space, you want to make sure that you create that list of keywords and phrases so that you can start to identify what pages you need on your website. And that each of those search keywords and phrases certainly the the most important ones each need individual pages on your website in some way, shape, or form, we start out with that list. Creating that list is a topic all on into itself. And we&#8217;ll probably have a topic about creating that in the future. But you&#8217;ll need to create that list of search keywords and phrases for your website, let&#8217;s cover a few things that you&#8217;re going need to know about when it comes to local search optimization. So as you&#8217;re launching your site, you won&#8217;t have a lot of content on your site yet, you could. But generally, new websites don&#8217;t have a lot of content yet. And so as a as a small business, and with the intent to be found locally, you should really start to optimize for the local traffic that&#8217;s brought to you predominantly that&#8217;s going to be through Google. And we have a wonderful tool provided by Google my Google My Business. And this is the listing that is actually syndicated to Google Maps, so that when someone does a search on Google, and you are a business that&#8217;s local, providing a product or service locally, you are then matched up with the people who are searching for those products or services because of your geographic proximity to the person doing the search. This is really important. If you go to google. com forward slash business, you will be taken to the Google My Business portal where you can create an account if you don&#8217;t have a Google account. Or if you don&#8217;t have a G sweet account, you will then go ahead and create one and then log into the Google My Business dashboard, you will then complete all of the information that Google asks from you, so that you have a full and complete Google My Business listing at that point, you are literally on the map, you&#8217;ll have to confirm, they&#8217;ll verify your address, and so on, so forth. And some businesses are actually not capable of being on Google My Business. So if you&#8217;re one of those few people, if you&#8217;re one of those few businesses that are not allowed on the platform, I&#8217;m sorry, you&#8217;ll have to just use other means that takes us then to the other means there is a service called local listing, Ninja. And there are other services out there Yext is among them and others that allow you to pay a regular fee for having access to putting your business Listen, getting into many different local directories so that they can be managed, I tend to like and fall on the side of using the service called local listing ninja. And it&#8217;s several hundred dollars, not several hundred dollars, actually, I think, at the time of recording around 600, or $700. And what it does is it actually has the, the staff of this company goes in and manually hand creates the profiles across all of these directories for your business. And they create the username and passwords and all that other fun stuff. And then they hand over the keys to you, they give you the usernames and passwords so that you have access to update them in the future. And you want to keep those things updated. I&#8217;ll talk a little bit about what those things are that you want to keep updated, I like that a lot better, that use the business owner, hold the keys to your local listing kingdom, as opposed to having some other company, like Yext or otherwise bright, local and forth having those companies hold the keys to the to your to your world. And when you disconnect from the service, then they retract all the information, I just feel like it&#8217;s much better for you to be able to have it to each his own, you could choose the opposite and, and go with the extra and other tool like that. totally understood. But just remember that that&#8217;s an ongoing cost that you&#8217;ll have to, you know, put into your marketing budget, the things that you need to manage. So say that you do go with local listing Ninja, you pay them the six or $700 and they go out there, and they register you with Apple, and Yelp, and all the other various, you know, Yellow Pages, and so on, so forth. And now you are fully listed on all the directories Fantastic. Well, you need to make sure that these things The following list of items is always kept up to date, so that you can get the best billing when it comes to local search traffic. One is your name, your busine

How to Build a Website, Part 4 &#8212; WordPress Design &#38; Development On this episode, we discuss my favorite website publishing platform for Small Business, WordPress. And, to do that, I had the pleasure of having on Web and BeyondCast with me WordPress developer Rene Morozowich, and Kevin W. Hoffman, WordPress Engineer at WordImpress, both of which I met through WordPress Pittsburgh. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://webandbeyondcast.com/005 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Questions we discussed on this episode: What is WordPress? Why would a Small Business owner use WordPress over another CMS or website builder, or straight code? What is a WordPress theme? What are theme frameworks? What should business owners know about themes? How do you choose the best theme for your business? What is a WordPress plugin? What WordPress plugins do you typically recommend, in general, for business owners to have on their website? What’re your favorites for specific functionality? Why? What are some pitfalls business owners experience when using WordPress plugins? If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or contact us. In this Cast &#124; WordPress Design &#38; Development Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Rene Morozowich Rene Morozowich is a freelance WordPress developer based in Pittsburgh, PA. A techie at heart, her passion lies in the database and code, but she loves the creativity and execution of the whole website lifecycle &#8212; from planning to launch. She works with designers to craft amazing sites for entrepreneurs, small businesses and non-profits. Rene is also a part of the Pittsburgh WordPress community and enjoys learning and talking about all things WordPress. Kevin W. Hoffman Kevin W. Hoffman is a WordPress Engineer at WordImpress where he is part of the team behind plugins such as Give and WP Business Reviews. He is an active volunteer and speaker in the WordPress community where he co-organizes WordCamp Pittsburgh. Show Notes &#124; WordPress Design &#38; Development Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Genesis Theme Framework Roots Sage Starter Theme Divi Theme Builder Beaver Builder WooThemes / WooCommerce / Storefront Theme (eCommerce / physical commerce) ThemeForest Codex (WordPress Manual) on Child Themes How to Create a WordPress Child Theme Cascading Style Sheets WordPress Pittsburgh Meetup UpdraftPlus (Backup Plugin) Wordfence (Security Plugin) Yoast SEO (Search Engine Optimization Plugin) MonsterInsights (Google Analytics Plugin) Google My Business Google Search Console Digital eCommerce &#8211; Easy Digital Downloads Nonprofit eCommerce &#8211; Give Audit Logging &#8211; WP Security Audit Log WP Business Reviews (Business Review Plugin) Mailchimp Email Newsletter Plugin Ninja Forms Plugin Jetpack Plugin MemberPress Membership Site Plugin WP Site Care WP Buffs Raw Text Transcript &#124; WordPress Design &#38; Development Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360e6198" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360e6198" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360e6198" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360e6198" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Voiceover Artists 0:00 Welcome to web and beyond cast were small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond with your hosts Tracy Smith Hello their Ray Sidney-Smith 0:10 small business owners and entrepreneurs and economic development agents. Welcome to Episode 005 Episode Five which is part of our five part series of web and beyond cast. I&#8217;m Ray Sydney Smith and I am joined here today with Rene Marissa which who is a freelance WordPress developer based in pittsburgh pa a techie at heart. Her passion lies in the database and code but she loves the creativity and execution of the whole website lifecycle from planning to launch. So welcome to the show. Rene and I also have with me Kevin W. Hoffman. Kevin is a WordPress engineer at WordPress where he is part of the team behind plugins such as give and WP business reviews. But we&#8217;ll learn a little bit more about those plugins today. He is an active volunteer and speaker in the WordPress community where he co organizes word camp Pittsburgh. Welcome to web and beyond cast Kevin. Hi, Ray. Kevin W. Hoffman 1:06 Thanks for having me. Great. I&#8217;m Ray Sidney-Smith 1:07 glad to have both of you aboard for this expert panel. And what we&#8217;re going to be talking about regarding building a website today is actually something called WordPress, which many of you may have heard maybe you even have a website that&#8217;s based on WordPress, maybe you have thought about launching a WordPress website but you&#8217;re really not quite sure what WordPress is today. What I&#8217;d really like to do is to talk about some of the fundamentals around what WordPress is what are themes? What are plugins and and how do you hire someone to design or develop a WordPress website? So I wanted to start off the conversation with you both with with the very fundamental question of what is Kevin W. Hoffman 1:48 WordPress, this big behemoth of an animal that runs a quarter of the world&#8217;s websites? What is WordPress? So WordPress is a content management system that allows you to manage your digital content, whether that is blog posts, articles, images, anything that you would normally host on a website WordPress gives you sort of a visual interface to manage that content. But one of the key concepts and when you first start to look at WordPress solutions is to understand this difference between WordPress dot org and wordpress. com. So WordPress dot org is an open source content management system which I worked in every day. And it&#8217;s a really flexible option for those of you who may be looking for e commerce solutions that want to extend their website with plugins and a large list of themes. wordpress. com is what we call a software as a service. So if you&#8217;re looking to just get a website up as quickly as possible and have your hosting and support all provided for you WordPress dot com can be a great solution, you need to understand that your options will be far more limited. The dot com side but as far as my day to day experience, it&#8217;s on the dark side Rene Morozowich 3:05 WordPress started as a blogging platform. And I think that maybe some people think that it&#8217;s only still for blogging and maybe your business doesn&#8217;t have a blog or doesn&#8217;t need content like that. However, I think it has evolved greatly in the past few years. And now it&#8217;s fully customizable and you can really use it for almost anything now. Kevin W. Hoffman 3:26 Yeah, absolutely. I started working with WordPress, you know, almost eight years ago when it really was focused on blog centric websites. And I&#8217;ve seen it sort of evolve into a more full fledged content management system. It started with the introduction of custom post types, which allowed you to add content outside of just blog articles and to really manage your content in an organized fashion that any small business owner would be looking for who needs something a bit beyond just a small collection of pages or blog posts so it&#8217;s a really full fledged content management system these days. Fantastic points. In our last episode, we discussed Squarespace and other website builders very similar to WordPress dot com. So for those of you who are listening and listen to the last episode, basically the sense of software as a service using Squarespace as both your website software and website host and all those other pieces in between WordPress dot com is kind of that for you. Whereas WordPress dot org is what you would consider what we typically call self hosted. Right, exactly. And I would say even though I love the WordPress community and love it as a tool, there are definitely times in places when some of those Software as a Service solutions make more sense. Like I alluded to earlier, if you&#8217;re trying to get a website up as quickly as possible and don&#8217;t need a whole lot of flexibility. Those are certainly options to look into that are really low budget provide a lot of the support and maintenance that you would need that kind of comes along with a WordPress site. So those are some of the concerns and we&#8217;ll look into today in addition to a lot of the benefits and the flexibility of WordPress and so Ray Sidney-Smith 5:12 why would a small business owner use WordPress over another content management system or website builder or straight coding the website themselves? I know there are probably some industrious listeners out there who are thinking, well, I&#8217;ll just I&#8217;ll just write my own code and I&#8217;ll I&#8217;ll throw up a website. And that will just be good enough because it&#8217;ll be an informational or brochure type website. And I really don&#8217;t need something like WordPress or another content management system. And there are several other open source content management systems, correct? Yeah, definitely. Unknown 5:45 And WordPress is by far the largest and most popular content management solution when it comes to those open source options. But I would say that the fundamental reason to choose WordPress rather than coding your own site from scratch scratch is although it may be a short term time investment up front, it will save you so much time in the long term in terms of anytime you want to add a new article Edit page content, you&#8217;re not digging through HTML source code. To do that you&#8217;re simply logging into your website and a visual interface that you understand that you don&#8217;t need to know a lot of that code in order to manipulate editing and updating and adding new content over time becomes a much simpler process as a result. Rene Morozowich 6:31 I think too, that because it&#8217;s such a popular solution, it&#8217;s very easy to find help in the form of another person, the WordPress community or even just online resources. There&#8217;s tons of blogs and other articles that you can search for any problem that you have with WordPress and find a solution relatively quickly. Ray Sidney-Smith 6:50 There&#8217;s a huge community that supports WordPress, it&#8217;s very easy to find someone at a at a reasonable and affordable rate to come help you with WordPress, whereas with some other country content management systems, those that&#8217;s not so easy to find. Like, I guess the internet makes people closer. So you are able to find Sega Juma or another or Drupal developer other than some other open source content management systems. But if you need someone to help you with a WordPress website, it&#8217;s pretty easy to find. Do you find that to be the case? I think Rene Morozowich 7:20 I think that it&#8217;s easy to find someone at a meetup online. There are word camps all over almost every weekend. It&#8217;s definitely easy to find someone. Kevin W. Hoffman 7:32 I think that WordPress is definitely your best bet in terms of finding help elsewhere. But I do I have seen that we are in kind of a transition period where small business owners especially are still a little bit hesitant to work with developers remotely. So even though you might be based in Pittsburgh, and you&#8217;re opening your shop and looking for a website developer, I would encourage you to open your possibilities to developers are across the country or around the world, even if they can prove that they they have what it takes to provide the type of solution you&#8217;re looking for. I will say that in my Ray Sidney-Smith 8:10 three years, as a single developer freelancer, I worked almost exclusively with remote clients. So there are most certainly developers out there that can serve your needs without ever having to share the same office space with you or even be in the same city Agreed. Agreed. And I think it&#8217;s also really important to take heed to finding the right person and fit and we&#8217;ll talk about this a little bit later in terms of finding the right fit in terms of your work style. And and if you&#8217;re going to have someone who is going to be doing ongoing maintenance and improvement to your website that you know how they best work with you in that process. But for the most part, you can really find someone who can help you with WordPress pretty easily nowadays, I wanted to move us forward into something that I think confuses a lot of people more than just what is WordPress? I think most people can understand WordPress is software that helps you build a website. But then you decide to use WordPress and designers and developers tell you immediately. Okay, well, you&#8217;re going to have to decide on a theme and plugins so that we can get your website launched. And I wanted to dig in a little bit here to what is a theme? And more importantly, what is the differentiation between a theme and what&#8217;s called an at least in the industry of framework? Why do but small businesses need these what what what are the reasons for having themes and, and how are they separate from WordPress, the software itself, Unknown 9:44 the primary purpose of the theme is to determine the visual appearance of your website. So it&#8217;s actually separate from your content, which allows you as the business owner has the person managing your WordPress site to completely change the visual appearance of your website without actually affecting the underlying content. So you can have a series of blog posts and pages and click through the WordPress theme repository and activate different themes to see how your website might look if you were to install and activate that theme for the long term. So it&#8217;s an easy way to kind of preview what your website could look like, without actually changing the content that you put a lot of time and effort into developing. Kevin W. Hoffman 10:28 Now we go from themes which you can think of as specific implementations of a of an aesthetic look on your website. And we also transition into the thought of the theme framework, which is not so much a specific implementation, but a methodology. So there are various theme frameworks. And WordPress, probably one of the most popular is called Genesis. And the important differentiator is that a theme framework can spawn an unlimited number of themes. It&#8217;s just a way of approaching that theme. And building it to a certain specification. One that I worked with for a long time was the roots Sage starter theme. And that is more of a developer heavy implementation of a theme within WordPress. And it kind of determines the entire approach you take when you&#8217;re developing and, and building out a theme. And that can limit the potential developers down the road that can help you with your website. So that&#8217;s I think the most important thing to consider when you&#8217;re when you&#8217;re looking at a theme framework is that as the business owner, it may not mean much to you up front, but it could determine who&#8217;s able to help you with your website down the road. And Rene, Ray Sidney-Smith 11:45 I know that you&#8217;re more the database coder. And so what&#8217;s what&#8217;s going on under the hood of WordPress when it comes to themes. What&#8217;s what is what is the theme, fundamentally doing to the workplace code, because the WordPress code is is pushing PHP, right? It&#8217;s pushing this, this this web language and it&#8217;s it&#8217;s has to be rendered in HTML for our web browsers to be able to view and so the theme, as Kevin said, is giving us the visuals, what what&#8217;s what&#8217;s happening there, how do those to sort of connect in layman&#8217;s terms, Rene Morozowich 12:24 so you can think about it in about three different layers. So you have the database where all of the data live. So all of your images, all of your menu options, your post your titles, your users, everything lives there, then you have that PHP code that goes into the database and pulls out the appropriate information. And combined with your HTML and CSS, it determines how your pages will look when they&#8217;re displayed on the screen. So basically, the theme is keeping your pages consistent. So each of your posts looks the same way. Each of your pages, you know, looks a similar way, your homepage looks a certain way. So all of these things are tied together to present consistent cohesive website. I was thinking that one way that you might understand a theme is if you&#8217;ve ever use PowerPoint before, so when you go into PowerPoint, you have the basic generic template. So you could think of that maybe like a theme framework. And under the options you can apply a styles and layouts and designs and that would be similar to a theme so for people have used PowerPoint before. And maybe that might make a little bit more sense Ray Sidney-Smith 13:39 definitely, that&#8217;s a great analogy. it renders the front end of your website in the way in which you believe you wanted to look what what are the challenges that business owners face when it comes to themes? And and I want to talk a little bit here about what should business owners really know about the themes they&#8217;re attempting to choose them? How do they choose the best thing for their business and what should they know about it. For example, I frequently talk to clients about how much functionality should be present within a theme because many WordPress theme developers now try to put a lot of functionality into themes and there&#8217;s a there&#8217;s a debate over how much functionality that we&#8217;ll talk about when we get to plugins very shortly should be in the theme verses that which should be present in your WordPress plugins and and in the functionality of the WordPress core. How do you explain that to people in terms of, you know, what they should, what they should look for, and what they should avoid when it comes to themes. Yeah, Ray, what you&#8217;re referencing, in terms of what you need to look out for is becoming more and more important these days, especially because we&#8217;re seeing the rise of these all in one themes. I remember when I was starting out and WordPress, you could find themes from any number of developers all across the web, there wasn&#8217;t much of a concern as to how popular it was, or whether it would be around for a long time it was just that you found a great looking theme and you wanted to throw it on your blog and you are set for the time being Unknown 15:15 these days, I feel at least that the theme ecosystem is kind of shrinking in terms of the number of players involved we&#8217;re seeing themes like divvy technically plugins but page builders like Beaver Builder, these are really taking over what used to be kind of a niche driven theme ecosystem where you would seek out a theme that fit your business specifically. Whereas what we&#8217;re seeing nowadays is Multi Purpose themes, which can really become the website for any type of business. So the the risk that you run and going with those multipurpose teams is exactly what you mentioned, Ray, that you might get way more functionality that you need, which results in something we refer to as theme, boat bloat can slow down your website, if it&#8217;s not coded in the proper way, because it&#8217;s loading a lot of resources you may not even be using. But it could also just complicate the user experience unnecessarily. Unknown 16:13 So Unknown 16:14 one of the key points that I recommend to business owners when they&#8217;re looking for theme is to first define your content, I know that it&#8217;s really tempting to go to WordPress dot org and immediately start browsing the theme repository. But you need to know and understand what content is going to be on your website so that it can then fit into the right theme. and not vice versa. A lot of times, you may see a pretty layout or a theme or a color scheme that appeals to you, and you install that theme. And before you know it, you&#8217;re so far into the process that you realize, hey, this theme isn&#8217;t really right for the content that I need on my website. So content first approach would be my biggest tip to business owners. Rene Morozowich 16:58 I think another thing to look for for is a theme that has been maintained, so one that the developer is still working on and continually making changes themes that have more than just a few users, kind of like road tested by other people. And instead of you just basically doing a bit of research, and I totally agree to with them, define your content first, and choosing a design that works for your content. So when Ray Sidney-Smith 17:27 you go to the to the theme directory, or you find these marketplaces for themes, like involved, oh, has theme forest and there are several others out there, woo, themes, and I&#8217;ll have shows, I&#8217;ll have links to these in the show notes. The there&#8217;s just so many choices. And it becomes a Paradox of Choice in terms of deciding on, you know, what kind of theme you want, do you have any just quick tips, tricks hacks that you have used in the past, and being able to narrow down the number of themes that are to be chosen either from the WordPress theme directory, which are the free themes that are available, or one of these private for purchase themes themselves, because like you, I think it&#8217;s really important like you both I think it&#8217;s really important to define your content, figure out what your audience is going to need, and then have that drive the decision for what kinds of themes you would even want to choose. And then you go to the theme store, and it&#8217;s just pages upon pages upon pages of options, Unknown 18:37 what what do you do to narrow that down when you&#8217;re first looking for theme, and you&#8217;re kind of overwhelmed with those options. One of the great things about WordPress is that any of the free themes that are available in the directory can actually be installed and activated on your site. Without any long term commitment, you know, you don&#8217;t have to pay anything, you just click install an action eight, or even preview, and you can see what your site would look like without having to make a commitment that you feel locked into over a long period of time. And that can be great if you&#8217;re in the market for a free theme. And there are some great free themes out there, especially if you have a certain type of site in mind. For example, if you&#8217;re in the market for an e commerce site, using a plugin like woo commerce, there&#8217;s a great free theme called storefront that is sort of specifically developed to work with e commerce sites. So I know I said earlier, you know, don&#8217;t feel like you need to be locked into a theme that&#8217;s specifically for your niche industry, but do look for themes that are matching the functionality that you&#8217;re looking for in your site. So if its e commerce, there are certain themes that certainly play better with web shops. On the On the flip side, if it&#8217;s more of a magazine site, or a online journal, there are other themes that are more suitable for that purpose. So again, identify your content and your functionality, and then look into the aesthetic appearance of your theme. Most sites Rene Morozowich 20:06 allow you to filter also on functionality features, other things like that. So you can go in and instead of just looking at all the WordPress themes at once, page after page after page, you can use the filter feature to determine things that you do care about or don&#8217;t care about. You could also rely on recommendations for other people. So it&#8217;s, you know, some other small business owners who are happy or not happy with the the theme that they&#8217;ve chosen. Or you could read reviews online, you can get some feedback that way also to try to narrow your choice down Ray Sidney-Smith 20:42 great recommendations. I know that one of the issues that I frequently come across is that a client will be working with a website designer, they&#8217;ll choose a theme and then they&#8217;ll install the initial theme. And it looks nothing like the demo theme. Right? I&#8217;m wondering if you&#8217;ve experienced this also. What Why, why is that? Why Why does it not look like the demo the demo and and how should people address the difference between the demo that they view of the theme and what it&#8217;s going to look like once they click activator preview to customize and set it up? Yeah, it Unknown 21:22 definitely requires some foresight and some imagination at this point in time. It&#8217;s the problem that you mentioned of seeing a great looking preview of a theme and then installing it on your website. And being underwhelmed is really one of the biggest issues that we&#8217;re kind of actively working on in the WordPress core development. And there are some open issues that are being developed that allow you to kind of install the preview content that you see on the directory into your website. So you do have that more one to one relationship between what you previewed and what you installed. But that&#8217;s very much in the world works right now. Currently, when you install a theme, and you may see sort of a blank slate that subtly reckon subtly references the team you&#8217;re looking for, but isn&#8217;t quite what you imagine, just just look and understand that the theme is really providing the blueprint for your site. And once you start to populate it with content, it may start to sort of resemble that vision you had in mind that you saw in the directory, Unknown 22:25 it&#8217;s sort of like Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come right. Rene Morozowich 22:31 I think it can be difficult to to get all of the demo content in. Some people want to import the demo content. So that the looks exactly like the demo. But to get all of that content in, it doesn&#8217;t always come over or come over correctly. And to Ray Sidney-Smith 22:48 some extent, I, I kind of think, look at themes. And again, this requires some bit of imagination and creativity. But I think about how the website is supposed to look from, for myself, business or my clients business, I never really think about it from the perspective that I want exactly that theme to look exactly that way. I guess it just really require some some imagination. So I would really invite listeners Kevin W. Hoffman 23:12 to come to that theme discovery process with a sense of wonder, with a sense of imagination and build out from there, you know, you&#8217;re not gonna be able to do everything with themes as well. And this brings us to child themes, and what what our child themes and and why should, why should small business owners have child themes. So the primary purpose of a child theme is to extend the parent theme, which means if you install a theme from the directory, or maybe you purchase a theme from one of the marketplaces. And then maybe you want to change the size of the heading on your homepage, or you want to go a little bit more than just adding some custom CSS. And maybe you want to edit the page template, and all you might want to add a byline under each of your blog post articles. Maybe that&#8217;s not part of the theme itself. But it&#8217;s quite simple once you understand child themes to go in and edit the theme and add some layouts or some templates that may not be part of the theme out of the box once you understand the child Damien process. And the key key reason to create a child theme and not just go hacking away at the theme itself has to do with theme updates. So WordPress has a built in update system that allows developers to update themes and plugins over time. And one of the pitfalls that a lot of new business owners who just caught their WordPress site will fall into is they start to edit their themes and plugins as they were installed. And what that means is that the next time you get an update, all of those changes might disappear on you. Because all the theme knows is that my original developer has some changes the push to my website. So they go on, grab those changes, overriding anything that you might have done. And that&#8217;s where child things come into play. So a child theme is kind of like a theme that extends the parent theme that you have total ownership. So even if that parenting gets updated, you can rest easy knowing that any changes you made will persist on your website, even after those updates. So that&#8217;s the key reason is to keep your changes separate from any changes that parenting Rene Morozowich 25:31 they sound a little bit scary, and maybe a little bit difficult. But a lot of pre purchase pre packaged themes nowadays come with a child theme. So when you install your theme, you will actually install two themes. The parent and the child and the child is the theme that you activate. And that&#8217;s the one where you&#8217;ll make all of your changes. If your theme doesn&#8217;t come with a child theme. There are resources online that will show you how to create a child theme. It&#8217;s not very complicated. Ray Sidney-Smith 26:01 I remember doing my first child theme and getting flummoxed by, you know, all the various coding pieces, and so on, so forth. And it&#8217;s really become much easier today than it than it used to used to be, especially Unknown 26:15 when they include them. Now, Unknown 26:16 one thing I would add to the child theme conversation is a recent change to WordPress added a custom CSS box in the customizer of your website. So if you go into the customizer, you can actually add CSS on top of your parent theme and not be at risk of losing those changes when the theme updates. So historically, if you just wanted to change, you know, the size of one heading, you would have to make a child theme just to accomplish that small task. One of the nice changes that I just referenced was this custom CSS box, which allows you to paste you know, a small amount of CSS just to make some of those minor changes into your website without having to go through that entire Child Theme process if that seems overwhelming. And for those who might not know CSS is stands for Cascading Style Sheets. And it&#8217;s the language that controls the look of your website. It&#8217;s the actual code that&#8217;s rendered in your web browser to help structure the visual styling and the layout of the website. Just one quick story from our last meetup we had an attendee who was just getting into a wordpress. com site and wanted to explore some of the themes that were available. And that brings us back to that you know, opening distinction between WordPress dot org and WordPress dot com. You need to be aware of which of those platforms you&#8217;re on. Because if you sign up for a dot com site, you&#8217;re going to be limited to only themes that work through the dot com directory. So you may start googling for you know, best WordPress theme for a marketplace for an online journal. And you&#8217;ll see some really great themes but understand and based on which those platforms are on dot org or or dot com, you may be limited in your options. So generally speaking, there are a lot more things available if you go the self hosted route with dot org. Just be aware of that. Ray Sidney-Smith 28:15 Yes, I believe that wordpress. com has about 300 themes available within its premium theme directory. I wanted to move us along in the conversation to our next segment on what our plugins and some of the recommendations for what plugins small business owners should really have, which ones they need and maybe they might want I frequently want more plugins that I need and and then some of the pitfalls that small business owners face when they have plugins such as updating or keeping them maintained in some way, shape or form Can you define for us what a WordPress plugin is in relative to WordPress core? The primary software we&#8217;re live now talked about the theme frameworks and child themes. What what&#8217;s a plugin so basically Rene Morozowich 29:06 a plugin is a chunk of code that add some additional functionality to your site. So ideally, plugins are easy to install and should be quick to configure. So if you think of it like an app for your phone, if you want to track how much you weigh, or map the run that you&#8217;re going to take on Saturday, you can install an app for that. So a plug in very similar to an app so one popular example is Woot commerce. If you want to sell physical or digital items on your site, you can install woo commerce to do that. Unknown 29:47 Yeah, one of the really nice things about plugins is it allows you to keep WordPress core very slim in terms of the number of resources it needs to power a website so that it provides general functionality that everyone&#8217;s going to need, like posts and pages and content management. But not everyone needs an online shop. Not everyone needs to host a podcast on their website. Ray Sidney-Smith 30:13 But if you do, that&#8217;s when plugins come into play. So they extend your core functionality of WordPress to do some of those more specialized things that you need for your business. Great explanation and I think it&#8217;s really important for people to take heed to the fact that WordPress plugins are super powerful. I mean, they&#8217;re very, very powerful to extend the abilities of WordPress but there are some things that it can and can do. I want to start off with what a WordPress plugin can do. I know you Rene said Woot commerce exists the plugin that allows you to create an e commerce or a store on your WordPress website. But let&#8217;s start off with maybe some of the more fundamentals what are the things that you believe every small business owner should really have installed as soon as they implement their WordPress installation. What are the first plugins that you always have small business owners install and why Rene Morozowich 31:13 I always install a good backup plugin and a security plugin. So I like Updraft Plus for backups and word fence for security. So in updrafts, plus, you can set a schedule on when you want to backup your site. And you can also have the backups go off site, which I like. So you can connect to Dropbox or Google Drive so that your backups aren&#8217;t tied to and live where your WordPress site lives also, like word fence because it can be set up so that you can be notified when your plugins are out of date. So it&#8217;s a security vulnerability whenever your your plugins are out of date. So it will let you know hey, it&#8217;s time to update this plugin or that plugin again, so that you know to go in and make those changes. So those are the two that I always install on every site. I always try to think about the plugins I need based on the functionality that every website should address. And one of those other areas in addition to security and backups is Seo. So a plugin called Yoast SEO is kind of the industry standard. It&#8217;s by far the most robust SEO plugin for WordPress. And it gives you a lot of SEO benefits just out of the box just by Unknown 32:31 activating it. Some things that I know a lot of small business owners don&#8217;t quite think about until a post from their website lands and their social media feed is how a post looks when it&#8217;s shared by other people. So with something like Yoast SEO lets you customize the image that appears in Facebook when an article shared or the title that shows up with a description when you search for your website. On Google also those things if you were to custom code, your website would be things you would be changing on a page by page basis that WordPress and Yoast SEO allow you to sort of automate, and then allow you to go in one level deeper and customize on a post by post basis. So that it should really become part of your workflow that when you add a new page or a new blog post, you&#8217;re also adding the meta description. It&#8217;s going to appear in Facebook and Twitter when that article shared. And you really address the whole pipeline from start to finish. Unknown 33:35 And the the other one I would mention is to have an analytic solution. So the, you know, what your website is doing, how it&#8217;s performing, and you&#8217;re not just playing guessing games in terms of the popularity of what worked, what didn&#8217;t. And there&#8217;s a great plugin called monster insights that makes including Google Analytics on your website, an absolute breeze, you don&#8217;t have to get into your team files and tweet code, you just sign up for Google Analytics, copy and paste your account number into monster insights and basically injects the Analytics code for you. And you can begin to see your traffic, your most popular pages, things like that over time. I&#8217;ll make note here because I Ray Sidney-Smith 34:15 think it&#8217;s pertinent that as many of you listening may or may not know, I&#8217;m the Google Small Business advisor for productivity. So I primarily talk about G Suite, Google My Business and the various other products that Google has Google Analytics and so and so forth. And one of the things that I frequently explain to new clients is that when they install WordPress, and they get set up that you really do want to install something like monster insights plugin first, and then get analytics connected. And then immediately thereafter setup Yoast SEO because it allows you to connect to the Google Search Console. So if you don&#8217;t know what the Google search console is, it&#8217;s the way in which Google crawls your website or looks at your website for purposes of feeding data into Google&#8217;s search engine. And it&#8217;s it just makes it a breeze to be able to use monster insights connected, have analytics running. And then once analytics is running on your website, then verifying with the Google search console is that much easier, because you can tell it to verify the website against your activation of Google Analytics. So just a little quick tip there in terms of being able to get all of that setup. And while I&#8217;m on my high horse, make sure you have a Google My Business listing and make sure that you have your you know, Google Analytics setup and your Google Search Console setup. I I can&#8217;t understand how many businesses don&#8217;t have those things set up and how important they are for it. While we&#8217;re on the topic of kind of favorite plugins. I Unknown 35:48 know that with a lot of small business owners listening, we should probably address the types of e commerce that you can accomplish with WordPress, because businesses are often looking to sell something to their website. So the three types that I identify our physical e commerce, which sounds kind of like, Unknown 36:09 you know, what physical and e commerce how did those two things go together? Well, it means that you&#8217;re selling physical goods through your website. And that&#8217;s a great a great solution for that problem is woo commerce. So that means that you go onto a website similar to kind of an Amazon. com experience place in order and then a piece of merchandise arrives at your door. Woo. Commerce is an excellent solution for that. But there are a lot of businesses that sell digital goods. So we have digital e commerce and there&#8217;s a plugin called easy digital downloads that really excels at selling those Digital Goods through your website. And it doesn&#8217;t include a lot of things like shipping and Unknown 36:51 calculations for inventory and a lot of that functionality that is inherent physical goods. Digital Goods don&#8217;t need that, but they may need things like software licensing or digital coupons that can only be redeemed a certain number of times easy digital downloads provides a lot of that functionality. And both of these plugins woo commerce and add as you might hear it called when you start looking into these options. They have an entire ecosystems around them so they have add ons that extend the plugins themselves right so we have woo commerce extending WordPress and then we have add ons extending Woot commerce if you want to do specific things like maybe calculate shipping rates to different parts of the country or different countries around the world. So those are two big ones physical and digital e commerce. And then just as a disclaimer, I&#8217;m a developer for this plugin. But give is another great option. If you do nonprofit e commerce meaning you accept online donations through your website. The important thing is to just recognize that Unknown 37:58 just selling something to your website can be accomplished in a lot of different ways. But there are specific plugins for specific reasons of why you&#8217;re selling that can make a lot of difference and reducing headaches down the road and really catering to your business and since you also commit to the WP business reviews what&#8217;s what&#8217;s that plugin all about and what&#8217;s its functionality? Sure, so that&#8217;s a new plugin that is in development and it kind of connects to your point earlier about making sure that you have your Google My Business account set up You also want to make sure that you have an ongoing flow of reviews coming into your business so what WP business reviews does is allows you to crab reviews from your various social networks you know Google Facebook Yelp hopefully your business is registered on at least those big three and you&#8217;re getting reviews on an ongoing basis from those platforms with WP business reviews does is allows you to take those reviews and display them on your website all in one central location so that you know someone might find you via Google clicking to your website and never see those great reviews that&#8217;s what this plugin is all about is showcasing those reviews directly on your site where your customers making a purchasing decision Ray Sidney-Smith 39:18 and when you mean by in development does that mean that if a person&#8217;s listening right now and wants it they can they have to wait or so we have we have a landing page up right now at WP business interviews calm where you can start to see how that plugin is going to work and the types of reviewed galleries and the different display format to be able to present your reviews in fantastic fantastic and and I&#8217;ll have links to all of this in the show notes everybody. So you don&#8217;t have to be scribbling down URLs while you&#8217;re listening. Rene I wanted to close out the conversation on on plugins with one some of your other favorite more bespoke use case and maybe some of the pitfalls that come into play when you start installing some of these plugins. So what are some of your favorites beyond the initial Updraft Plus and and word fence for security backup and security respectively. What are the things that you like for other other kinds of use cases I Rene Morozowich 40:23 think it&#8217;s really important to communicate with your visitors so I really like MailChimp and the MailChimp plugin connects automatically with your MailChimp account so that you can let your users know whenever you have a new blog post. You can send them newsletters, and like I said everything connects automatically. So I use MailChimp a lot. And also I like ninja forms. I think it&#8217;s really easy to use. And you can collect a lot of good information from the visitors on your site. As I Ray Sidney-Smith 40:55 said before you install all of these plugins. And at some point it&#8217;s too good to be true that you could just install all these plugins and then you know your websites going to work wonderfully well. What are some of the pitfalls that small business owners or business owners in general website publishers experience when they install plugins. Rene Morozowich 41:13 There&#8217;s a couple of things that you want to check when deciding which plug into us and how many plugins to use. So you want to make sure that it does have users and good ratings. You also want to make sure that you&#8217;re getting it from a reputable developer and that the developer is continuing to update the plugin. You also want to make sure that it is compatible with the newest version of WordPress. So when WordPress is updated, or when you update WordPress, you want to check to make sure that your plugin still functions as you think it should. Yeah, Kevin W. Hoffman 41:46 so one of the points I mentioned earlier with themes is that you can have bloat where you have more functionality than you need. and that in turn puts a bigger load on your website requiring users to download things that will never actually be seen results in a slower website, etc. You can have that same experience because of bloated plugins. And I would address one misconception is that a lot of times people will open a new WordPress website that maybe they&#8217;re maintaining and they&#8217;ll see a long list of plugins and say, Oh, no, what is this? What is this business owner doing? They have 40 plugins on their website. And I would say that it&#8217;s not so much the number of what number of plugins that is an issue. It&#8217;s what those plugins are doing and what kind of assets are required in order to power those plugins. So actually a lot of small single purpose plugins, it can be a good thing and that&#8217;s something I definitely did as it as a freelance developer as I would often develop custom plugins that did one thing and one thing only, and what that allows you to do was turn things off as you need them, whereas you don&#8217;t need them without affecting major parts of your website. So don&#8217;t just look at a large number of plugins as a bad thing. But really understand what are those plugins what those plugins are doing and how it&#8217;s affecting your website. Ray Sidney-Smith 43:07 I know this wasn&#8217;t in our agenda, but I wanted to speak very briefly since you sort of brought up bloat about the about automatic which is the company that helps produce WordPress dot org and they own wordpress. com The hosted service they also produce the plugin jetpack. And I&#8217;m curious about both of your perspectives on bloat in that case, because jetpack is a huge plugin, and it does many, many things do you do you feel gravitated toward using jetpack or do you avoid it, I&#8217;ve used Rene Morozowich 43:42 jetpack in a few cases and I&#8217;ve found more difficulties with it then benefits so I don&#8217;t install it unless the theme requires it or unless another plugin specifically says hey, I need jetpack to function. It does do a lot of great things. However, like I said, I&#8217;ve had some difficulties with it. So I try to stay away from it. If I can. Kevin W. Hoffman 44:08 I would agree. I don&#8217;t use jetpack too often. But it&#8217;s not necessarily because of the bloat. Because I think it even though it does include a lot of kind of unrelated modules, it does a pretty good job of only activating what you&#8217;ve told it to. So if you need a contact form, you can kind of turn that module on. If it&#8217;s not on, those resources won&#8217;t be loaded. So I mean, the team behind jetpack are really some of the best WordPress developers. One of the reasons I don&#8217;t use it so much is because it requires a wordpress. com login, even if you&#8217;re on a dot org site. So that that sounds confusing just to say, right, imagine if you&#8217;re a client trying to configure jetpack and they&#8217;re thinking Oh, my developer Kevin just gave me this whole explanation about WordPress dot org versus calm but now I need calm to use it on dot org. So that whole login aspect just to activate a plugin is one of the reasons it kind of turns me off to using it. But as a product itself and the code underneath it&#8217;s it&#8217;s pretty impressive. So if the modules in jetpack or something you need it&#8217;s certainly worth looking into. There are Ray Sidney-Smith 45:17 definitely pros and cons to all of this you know i i use jetpack actually in two of my larger multi site network WordPress installations, which is basically a WordPress installation that has many websites all inside the same database. Whereas I don&#8217;t use it in some of the smaller installations that I do purely because I don&#8217;t need it you know, it&#8217;s just not necessary to extend WordPress in that way. So I think it really comes down to is this is this plugin going to do what I needed to do, what can I do to limit the complications that can happen for example, I have a client right now who is installing a member press plugin into their WordPress core and is having problems with the with some kind of jetpack login loop that&#8217;s happening, right. So the member press team is working with her to be able to figure that out. And that&#8217;s a complication that we may have to decide against jetpack so that we can get this membership website up and running. So you know, when those things happen, it really is important for you to take heed. That one jetpack is not the end all be all of plugins, there are many of them out there, and that it&#8217;s a great plugin. It&#8217;s not necessarily something that will blow your system. Unless you activate all the features within jetpack, I would say you could even you could treat it as kind of a form of progressive enhancement. So even Kevin W. Hoffman 46:36 if you started with jetpack because you needed a contact form or an easy gallery, you know, jetpack provides both those things out of the box, essentially. But maybe you start to get into more of a complex registration process like Ray mentioned, where you need something like member press, that would be a time where maybe you turn off your jetpack module for contact form, and you install a more complex and more feature rich plugin that can handle that for you. So it&#8217;s absolutely your website is a living being it evolves over time. And the plugins you install on day one aren&#8217;t locked in for life. That&#8217;s the great thing about a plugin. Rene Morozowich 47:14 Some people think that you do a website and then it&#8217;s over. And you don&#8217;t ever have to pay attention to it. Again, it&#8217;s like a checkbox. So something that your business needs that you&#8217;ve checked the box. And now you can move on to the next thing. And I think that that is not a great way to look at it. I think that a website is something that needs time and care and attention, especially with a WordPress site, you should be updating you shouldn&#8217;t be adding new content, I liken websites to especially in the small business world to children, you know, people who who are parents who are aware of this, but you have children and they just get more and more needy as they get older. Ray Sidney-Smith 47:59 They don&#8217;t become they do grow up, but they do leave home eventually. Some of them and but they they still need care and concern. And you don&#8217;t ever lose that sense of wanting. And I first for some reason with small business owners. It&#8217;s a kind of set it and forget it, you walk away. And I really do believe that a website should be a website that a website that a small business launches should be a website that you want to come back to every day and use it should it should have that sense of draw for you as the business owner in the perspective of your audience. So how how would you want to be if you were your own audience to want to, to approach this tool every day, whether that be from an informational perspective or functionality perspective. But websites aren&#8217;t great, because you can set it and forget it and never fix anything with it, or keep it updated or, you know, secure or backed up or otherwise, you&#8217;re sort of like a garden, you need to keep tending to the garden in order for it to keep blossoming. So I really appreciate that. That concept there. So one of the things you should really be asking yourself and any potential developer that you&#8217;re working with is what is the long term plan for your site? This is something I was certainly guilty of as a young Freelancer that would often spec out a project right up and write up a contract, feel really confident going into a project with a client, build the site and then think oh, no, what&#8217;s next, because as we know, WordPress, sites, themes, plugins, they all require updates to keep them secure, to keep them working and functioning together. So you need to ask your developer what is the long term plan and that can go I would say one of two ways. Either they are in the business of maintenance or they&#8217;re not. And personally, I was never a big fan of website and payments. To me, it&#8217;s a lot of tedious work, a lot of clicking updates multiple times a week to keep your website up to date. And some developers who really just want to focus on creating sites may not do that. And that&#8217;s okay. But they should have someone to turn you to once the hand off the website. So there are companies like WP site care, or I just met Joe from WP buffs at WordPress, Pittsburgh work camp Pittsburgh, and Joe&#8217;s company will take a site say after a developer like myself would finish one. And they would take it over and handle those updates on an ongoing basis for a small monthly fee. Whereas, you know, maybe paying a developer to do that every single month might become more costly. There are options that will keep your website up to date for a small amount of money per month. But you can rest easy knowing that someone is watching over your site. So that&#8217;s my, that&#8217;s my key takeaways. If it&#8217;s not the original developer, make sure they have someone there handing it off to who was kind of the gatekeeper that can take care of it over time. Rene Morozowich 50:56 So I have a few questions to ask when hiring a designer or developer or a designer developer or a unicorn, as we call them? Do they come with a good recommendation from someone that you know and trust? Do they have a nice site themselves easy to find contact information? When you do send them an email or call them? Are they responsive? Do they get back to you in a timely fashion? Or the courteous, authentic, straight forward? And after you have that conversation with them? Do you get a sense that you would work well together? Do you like them? Did you connect? Do they have a contract, you want to protect yourself? They need to protect themselves? And what about their portfolio? How does it look, if a site doesn&#8217;t look good, because the design isn&#8217;t very good, I hesitate to use it because people are very visual. So I may have done a great job on the backups and the maintenance or the site migration. But I can&#8217;t really showcase that because I worried that people are going to judge me based on the design. And also Ray Sidney-Smith 51:58 clients have a tendency sometimes move a site design in a direction that may not be in line with what the designer necessarily feels comfortable with. And that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s the collaborative sometimes the the double edged sword of collaboration is that you have someone who&#8217;s a professional, I always liken it to this, if you go, if you ever need heart surgery, do you wake up mid surgery and tell the doctor where to put the scalpel you know, you have a heart surgeon for a reason, you know, you&#8217;re on the table, he, he or she does the job. And but it doesn&#8217;t quite work that way, when it comes to websites, you really do need to have a collaborative approach. And that means that a designer may have to compromise on some design element for function or otherwise, that they may not want to showcase on an in their portfolio. So totally understandable. Plus, you know, website publishers, you know, you have a small business owner who launches a website. And then right after they&#8217;re done with the designer developer, they go ahead and change the site, see this, on occasion, a website developer will come into an SPC for a counseling session about how to, you know, market their business or get things organized. And they will open up their portfolio and show it to me on their website. And then we&#8217;ll click on a link and it&#8217;ll go to a live site of their clients. And the site&#8217;s down or, you know, things of that nature. So if you happen to be a website, developer designer listening, just take screenshots, what are what are some other things that small business owners should pay attention to, as it relates to WordPress, and sort of the design and development side of things, if there&#8217;s anything else that you both wanted to share. So one thing to be aware of, is that Kevin W. Hoffman 53:44 developers are kind of a skeptical bunch when it comes to hiring them. And they&#8217;re very wary of what we call spec work, which is clients or business owners that may be looking for either a free website are really low budget website in return for free publicity or stock options down the road. The idea is that new business owners are understandably strapped for cash, and may not have everything they want to put into a great website up front. And as a result, they can kind of look for developers to go all in on a project without having much commitment from the other side. And, and that can go the other way as well, as Rene was mentioning, it&#8217;s sometimes it&#8217;s difficult to showcase projects in your portfolio that really reflect the work that you do, you can also have not so great developers that showcase really great that aren&#8217;t necessarily indicative of the work that they put into it. So one thing that kind of addresses both sides of that equation is what&#8217;s called a paid trial period. And that was something I did with WordPress when they hired me, and I am a really big fan of it, because I think it just shows respect on both sides as a company that was looking to hire, they were willing to kind of go through a small kind of microcosm of a project that would reflect what my larger scale work would do, would would provide for them down the road. And what is a common sort of agreement to come up with in website development is to pay half up front and half on completion. So that&#8217;s exactly what they did. And immediately, that can be a great sense of respect them for me and me for them is that they were willing to invest in me up front with the understanding that I would follow through on that. So if you have a if you come across a developer who&#8217;s looking for something like that, either a paid trial period, or what is sometimes called a paid discovery phase, which is when a developer sits down with you goes, you&#8217;re your plan your blueprint for your site, make sure they know exactly what you want. And sometimes they will charge for that. And that&#8217;s perfectly fine. Because their time is valuable and worth that. But just understand that that is so often worth it. Because you find out right up front, what it&#8217;s really like to work with them in the trenches, you&#8217;re not just looking at resumes and portfolios, but you&#8217;re actually working with them. So that&#8217;s something that would really look into as a business owner. Rene Morozowich 56:26 Along those same lines, if a business doesn&#8217;t have a lot of money to start with, you can do what&#8217;s called an MVP, or a minimum viable product. So you can develop a site or work with someone to develop a site that is small, but it&#8217;s very basic, you know, what you need at this point. And then as your business grows, you can work with that developer designer, again, to add additional functionality, maybe you&#8217;re not ready to do a newsletter, you know, out of the gate. But in six months, you&#8217;ve built up enough clients customers that you&#8217;re now ready to do that. So you can add that on at a later point, I do Ray Sidney-Smith 57:06 really think that most small business owners do start with the ideal in mind, as opposed to what&#8217;s necessary at this point in my business. So I really take that to heart I think that&#8217;s important. One thing that I will add an end on note, a note is, especially when you come to this point in choosing a website platform like WordPress, and you get through all of this, make sure that you have what I call a TMP or a tweak maintenance plan. I talked about this in Episode Two with Ryan Cleveland of web design. And I think it&#8217;s something that I just really believe in. It&#8217;s whether whether it&#8217;s something that&#8217;s contractual with the person you&#8217;re working with, or you find someone like the services that Kevin had mentioned to keep your website backed up and secure and updated, you need to have some level of tweaking period where you get the site you know either in a staging perspective or live preferably live and see what&#8217;s going on so that you can then tweak it over time get it to a place where you&#8217;re comfortable and then it goes into kind of a maintenance mode where you are updating your security you&#8217;re updating your plugins you&#8217;re making sure that that things are doing what they should be doing and that you&#8217;re checking in on that or someone is being someone&#8217;s doing it for you so I think that&#8217;s really important to have so I wanted to thank you both for being on with me today This has been a fantastic conversation about WordPress and its fundamental parts Rene which who&#8217;s a freelance WordPress developer you can find her online at rename arose which calm and Kevin W. Hoffman who was the WordPress engineer at word impress. So thank you both for being here on the show with me. Thanks, Ray. Thanks. Since we talked about all of these variety of WordPress plugins and tools, we&#8217;re not going to talk about the best tool the week this week because all those plugins are our best tools of the week this week. That said, that&#8217;s the end of this episode of web and beyond cast. Thanks for listening to weapon beyond cast for small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond. I&#8217;m your host Teresa de Smith. Until next time, here&#8217;s to your small business success on the web and beyond.

How to Build a Website, Part 3: Using the Squarespace Website Builder Welcome, Small Business owners, entrepreneurs and community, to episode 004, which is part three in our five-part series for the Web and BeyondCast launch, on how to build a website for business. I&#8217;m Ray Sidney-Smith and so far, I’ve chatted with with experts on the principles of good website design and development, and getting your content together for your website launch. On today’s show, I have a panel of Web experts for building a website completely using a website builder called Squarespace. Let’s see what Squarespace is all about and if they’re the right choice for your business website. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://webandbeyondcast.com/004 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or contact us. In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Kerstin Martin Originally from Germany, our first Squarespace expert panel member is Kerstin Martin, who has lived in four countries and travelled around the globe before settling down in the beautiful seaside town of Bellingham, WA. Her professional background in the airline, technology, finance and education industries eventually led her to starting her own business in her early 50s, as a Squarespace Web Designer and officially endorsed Squarespace Authorized Trainer. Kerstin specializes in designing professional websites for small businesses in only three days, and also teaches popular online courses in Squarespace web design, SEO and e-course hosting, as well as a business course on building a successful web design business. Paige Brunton Our next Squarespace expert panelist is Paige Brunton, a Squarespace web design expert, who helps creative entrepreneurs launch sites that connect and convert, all in just two weeks. Paige’s blog is the go-to destination for Squarespace info, helping thousands of Squarespace users every month. Her Start Your Squarespace Website Workbook is a popular free option for setting up the foundation of your Squarespace site. Paige earned a master&#8217;s degree in the arts from the University of Mississippi. You&#8217;ll find Paige traveling Europe and Asia where she lives as a location-independent digital nomad. Brad Good And, last but not least, Brad Good is an officially endorsed Squarespace Specialist, Authorized Trainer and has been building sites on Squarespace since 2008. He has helped hundreds of Squarespace customers with their websites. Brad started a web development company, based in San Diego, California, in 2015 that specializes in Squarespace and has built a team of 13 talented designers and developers. Questions/Topics We Discussed About Squarespace What are the benefits/advantages and disadvantages of using a website builder platform like Squarespace versus building on a self-hosted website content management system? Who is Squarespace best for? What’s the process you take clients through when they want to launch a website? What challenges business owners the most when trying to get a website launched, in your experience working with owners? You work in a very visual niche industry with creative and design professionals. How does that affect your design process? I’m guessing these sites are image and/or video rich; does that require different accommodations within Squarespace? How does Squarespace square up against other website builders regarding mobile/responsive design, loading speed (desktop/mobile), SEO, and design flexibility? Are there features that Squarespace really cannot do well? Do you use other services or tools to overcome those within Squarespace? Squarespace has a reputation of being a “do-it-yourself” platform. What’s the value in paying a professional? Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. While we focused on one website builder in our discussion on this episode, there are many; below is a list of the few I frequently recommend to clients: Squarespace Website Builder (powered by GoDaddy) The New Google Sites WordPress.com Weebly SiteBuilder Wix And, here are a few lesser known ones to Small Business, but well worth checking out if it suits your needs: https://thegrid.io/ https://tilda.cc/ http://governor.io Google Product Feed for Squarespace eCommerce sites: https://answers.squarespace.com/questions/32730/google-merchant-data-feed-google-shopping.html (In short, no, Squarespace doesn’t do this natively. But, there are third-party solutions on that page that can possibly do it for you.) Reserve With Google &#8211; booking directly from Google Maps with the right booking/scheduling partners. Acuity Scheduling is just one of those Reserve With Google Partners. 17 Hats Square Secrets course by Paige Brunton Squarespace Templates If you want a separate domain name registrar, you can register with Web Services, or Google Domains. (If you do use Google Domains, make sure that if you have a G Suite account (links to a free trial), that you log in and purchase it in your G Suite Administrator account.) Square Studio plugins Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360ea335" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360ea335" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360ea335" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360ea335" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Voiceover Artist 0:00 Welcome to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond with your host Ray Sidney-Smith. Ray Sidney-Smith 0:11 Welcome small business owners, entrepreneurs and community to Episode 004 Episode Four, which is part three in our five part series for web and beyond cast on how to build a website for your business. I&#8217;m racing Smith and so far I&#8217;ve had a chance to chat with Ryan Cleveland of W street design on the principles of good website design and development, I hosted Beth Lawton of New Media Services, Stacey more as a focus copywriter and Tara clapper of Express writers a panel on content writing specialist to discuss getting your content together free website launch. And on today&#8217;s show. I have a panel of web experts and a whole different paradigm for building a website completely using a website builder called Squarespace. Let&#8217;s see what Squarespace is all about. And if they&#8217;re the right choice for your business website. But first, let me introduce you to my guests on whether beyond cast today, originally from Germany. Our first Squarespace expert panel member is Kirsten Martin, who has lived in four countries and traveled around the globe before settling down in the beautiful seaside town of Bellingham, Washington. Her professional background in the airline technology, finance and education industries eventually led her to starting her own business in her early 50s. As a Squarespace web designer and officially endorsed Squarespace authorized trainer Kirsten specializes in designing professional websites for small business owners in only three days and also teaches popular online courses in Squarespace web design, SEO and E course hosting as well as a business course on building a successful web business. Welcome to web and beyond cast, Kirsten, thank you very much. It&#8217;s wonderful to be here. Our next Squarespace expert panelist is page Brunton, a Squarespace web design expert who helps creative entrepreneurs launch sites that connect and convert all in just two weeks pages blog is the go to destination for Squarespace. info helping thousands of Squarespace users every month, her start your Squarespace website workbook is a popular free option for setting up the foundation of your Squarespace site page earned a master&#8217;s degree in the arts. From the University of Mississippi you&#8217;ll find Paige traveling Europe and Asia, where she lives as a location independent digital nomad, welcome as well page to web and beyond cast. Thank you so much excited to be here. And last but not least, Brad good is an officially endorsed Squarespace specialist authorized trainer, and has been building sites on Squarespace since 2008. I didn&#8217;t even know Squarespace was around in 2000. He has helped hundreds of Squarespace customers with their websites. Brad started a web development company based in San Diego, California, and 2015 that specializes in Squarespace, and has built a team of 13 talented designers and developers. Welcome Brad to web and beyond cast. Thank you very much excited to be here. Fantastic. Well, welcome all of you again. And so now on to Squarespace. And the whole construct of website builders. Obviously, they&#8217;ve been around for a while, I mean, back in the geo city days that Yahoo eventually purchased and so on so forth. But I wanted to first start off the conversation with there are other website builder platforms out there. There&#8217;s Weebly and wicks and, and many others out there. And you all have decided to set your sights on and use Squarespace not only for your own website development businesses, but for your customers. And I was curious about what some of those benefits and disadvantages are of using those platforms comparing those against other website builders but also against say WordPress or Drupal or Juma or other kinds of self hosted versions, which we&#8217;ll talk about in future episodes. Kerstin Martin 3:50 like Brad I&#8217;ve been using Squarespace since 2008, I still remember version five, loved it and miss it still to a degree. And I&#8217;ve actually been designing websites just for my own pleasure since 1999. I started with just writing websites in HTML and I became a blogger in 2005, I used WordPress for quite a few years tried Juma hated that. And so when Squarespace came out, you know, when I became aware of them in 2008, it was quite a revelation for me actually, because I&#8217;ve been using WordPress self hosted now I&#8217;m not a technical person, you know, I&#8217;m not a programmer. And I know just enough, you know, to do what I want to do. And so I&#8217;m entirely self taught. And I do enjoy that to a degree. But WordPress, you know, just just drove me crazy. And, you know, because you have to keep the up plugins updated. And I don&#8217;t know, the back end management I really didn&#8217;t like. So then square space, you know, came out and I looked at it, and it was beautiful, you know, I had really, really nice designs, very nice templates. And it was so easy to use, you know, the editor, I didn&#8217;t need to use coding anymore. And so I I just fell in love with it, you know, and then since then they&#8217;ve moved in on to version seven. So I&#8217;ve been pretty much to using just Squarespace for the last 10 years and professionally for the last four years, you know, when I started designing for small businesses, I still love it, I have to say, and they keep improving all the time. So, um, it&#8217;s been a very good experience. Paige Brunton 5:40 Yeah, so I had a similar experience to Kirsten and that I, when I first got started, I did what everyone does. And I went and compared every single website platform. So I use things like WordPress and I tried out wicks and Weebly and a few also Google blogger at the time. And when I was using the different website platforms, WordPress, well, it could achieve everything that I wanted it to. I just found it so difficult. And when I would edit things in the back end, and then go on to the front end. It just didn&#8217;t look the way I wanted it to. And then I tried out some of the other like DIY, do it yourself sort of website building platforms like wicks and Weebly with those ones, I found they weren&#8217;t as customizable as I wanted them to be. But they were definitely easier to use. And so when I found Squarespace, I felt like it was sort of the perfect match in between exactly like what I wanted, like it was powerful. I could do what I wanted, I could create what I thought of in my mind on the page. But it wasn&#8217;t a technical nightmare. And so that is sort of what I see is why it&#8217;s really can compete with the other platforms. Brad Good 6:34 I like the fact that Squarespace is a hosted application, the content owner doesn&#8217;t really need to worry about upgrades, third party plugin integrations, worrying about example, WordPress being upgraded. And then breaking plugins. A lot of other content systems rely on a lot of third party things to make them work. Squarespace I think did a good job of kind of keeping the the reins on whole application, keeping control of it, releasing updates throughout the whole product. And it allows the, the content owners really focus on the content and not trying to worry about the back end. Ray Sidney-Smith 7:12 Those are all legitimate arguments for Squarespace. And so this this kind of leads me into the second part of the question. And my next question, so I&#8217;m going to put those two together for you as we make our way on. I know you&#8217;re all Squarespace experts and Squarespace advocates. But what are the disadvantages? What what are the what are the merely little things that you don&#8217;t like about Squarespace? Currently, I&#8217;m more curious in the sense of what makes Squarespace good there are, there are things that probably makes Squarespace not the best for some audiences for some business owners, where they may want to have more flexibility with the system and or things that Squarespace maybe doesn&#8217;t do. I&#8217;m curious about your perspective on that, and, and who you think Squarespace is really best for Squarespace has Paige Brunton 8:00 an e commerce platform. But I find that if you get into many, many, many products, well, I can handle that it&#8217;s not the great for the organization of them. So for example, if you go on Nordstrom dot com, you&#8217;ve noticed that there&#8217;s like dresses. And then within dresses, they sort of break it down into day dresses, or different types of dresses. Or Same thing with pants, where&#8217;s the Squarespace just the navigation options. If you start getting into many, many, many products, like I&#8217;m talking hundreds of products, I find the organization isn&#8217;t the best for that. So if you&#8217;re going to be starting a website, and the primary purpose is to build an online store that now or in the future is going to have maybe hundreds of products, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s the best platform, something like Shopify might make more sense. Yeah, I Kerstin Martin 8:40 would actually agree with that. I literally just moved one of my clients, from Squarespace to Shopify, for those reasons. And it&#8217;s not just that it&#8217;s harder to organize, you know, for the user, also in the backend, the or if you have hundreds of products, it&#8217;s really not that easy to to organize for yourself as well, you know, and when I like I hadn&#8217;t used Shopify before. So this was my first experience with that. And I thought, Oh, my God, you know, this, you know, it allows you to filter your products and in the back end as well, and to do bulk updates. And, you know, those things are not possible. What I do like, and Squarespace is when you sell services or digital products as well, I think it works very well for that. And it&#8217;s a very nice seamless process for the client physical products. Yeah, they can be tricky. Also, the shipping, I find, you know, the shipping has definitely limitations, you know, that you can&#8217;t do product specific shipping for rates, for instance. And so I agree with page you know, that the commerce platform has some limitations in that regard. Ray Sidney-Smith 10:00 One thing that I had a quick question on is the ability for you within the Squarespace ecommerce functionality, are you capable of syndicating into Google&#8217;s product feed for Google Shopping? I&#8217;m Brad Good 10:12 not sure about Google Shopping. But I know Instagram has been integrated. Okay, yeah, I&#8217;ll look it up and put it in the show notes. You know, it&#8217;s really important for you to be able to show up, if you if you want to be found in Google search in Google shopping&#8217;s channel, you know, you want to be able to syndicate into the Google Merchant Center. The Commerce is definitely on the entry level of commerce. And I think it&#8217;s a good starting point for a lot of businesses to evaluate if they can sell their product. Like what was mentioned is we&#8217;ve actually migrated a lot of Squarespace clients to Shopify, once they&#8217;ve outgrown kind of their limitations, the internationalization of of commerce is getting better. It was an English until, I don&#8217;t know, six months ago only, but it&#8217;s evolving and it is getting better. So we&#8217;ll see what&#8217;s on the horizon. I know Ray Sidney-Smith 11:00 that one thing people have a frequent question about is the migration process. All of you had brought that up already? What is the migration process like for people? How do people move from Squarespace to another platform, when they learn that Squarespace perhaps doesn&#8217;t fit their needs, it is Paige Brunton 11:18 honestly like building your website, again, I would say. So different content management systems, they&#8217;ve started doing things where you can say import and export products, or blog posts, or whatever. But if you do think about moving, I would really say that you&#8217;re basically starting again, and beginning you might have your content a little bit more prepared than you would like Originally, the first time you go to build a website. And but it is do you think of it as, like a whole new website built, because it is definitely it&#8217;s pretty much what it is, Kerstin Martin 11:43 I would agree with that as well. Now, you can, you know, export content from Squarespace. It&#8217;s all for instance, you can export your products into a, you know, CSV file, and then you import that into whatever contact management system you use, oh, electron Wi Fi, but even there, you will probably still have to go in and reformat things and, and adjusted and so like page says, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s pretty much like a new website Ray Sidney-Smith 12:11 it is there&#8217;s a lot of evaluation of what needs to be migrated as well, if you&#8217;re blogging as part of your commerce site that is transferable. But all the site pages specifically aren&#8217;t really transferable. So it is kind of redesigning like everyone mentioned, and this goes back to the importance of choosing a platform upfront that you believe you&#8217;re going to be with for for a while moving along, I wanted to turn the conversation over to the process you all take to bring your clients through to launching the site. Carson, you said that you you have a three day process page, you have a two week process. Brad, I&#8217;m not quite sure. But I&#8217;m guessing yours is also probably some some short period of time. And I know that from the clients that I&#8217;ve worked with, who have launched websites, they can take sometimes much longer periods of time, and much shorter periods of time, based on how much content and the complexity of the site they&#8217;re building. Can you each give me a general overview of what that process looks like, as it relates to using a website builder as opposed to a another platform. Kerstin Martin 13:16 So yeah, so you mentioned that I have, you know, the three day process now, not, I didn&#8217;t always do that, when I started out, it basically took as long as it took, and I&#8217;ll build more complex websites. But I found that for myself, I enjoy the shorter projects. And, but you have to be a specific client in order to, you have to be very prepared as a client with your content. And I help you, you know, so I basically, you know, I have a consultation call with my clients where we determine whether we&#8217;re a good fit. And then I have a sequence of, you know, automated emails and documents that are sent the clients and access to a dropbox folder where they upload their content. And so I helped them as best as I can, you know, to get prepared, and then they submit their content up to the day before we start, I basically do the design, I communicate with them throughout the three days, and then hand off the website. And the way I do that is, and I know a lot of other designers do the same thing. I do video tutorials, so that it is specifically for their website, and on how to update the website once I&#8217;ve handed it over to them. So I&#8217;m finding so I&#8217;ve only started this like, a few months ago, and every client have worked with so far during the three day websites. I mean, they all loved it, you know, but it doesn&#8217;t work for everyone. A lot of clients have more complex needs. And I assume that is what Brad does, for instance, as well, you know, because they have more pages, you know, they have maybe a shop, you maybe have to integrate more third party services, you know, so you don&#8217;t really Ray Sidney-Smith 14:59 have plugins, you can use third party services, like acuity scheduling, for instance. So the process can be a little bit different in that regards. So it really, you know, depends on the client. But I would say, for a lot of small businesses, Squarespace is definitely a good choice. It&#8217;s very easy also to maintain for them. Once the website has been designed, you know, and I am enough for my process, I tried to I have a workflow, I use actually a 17 hats, you know, which is a Mac client management system. And it also contracts, everything is automated. And, and it works very well. You mentioned acuity scheduling. And for those of you who are listening, it&#8217;s important that you know, that Google has a project called reserve with Google. And that is the ability for different businesses, different verticals, right now, I think it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s in the health and beauty space fitness space, and you can, then you can actually schedule appointments with a vendor with a business, a local business, one that is on Google Maps directly through Google Maps. And because of that, integrating with these third party services like Kirsten was talking about is actually also another important choice. And so I&#8217;ll put a link to this in the show notes. But look at the reserve with Google partners that currently exist. So that if you do launch a square space website, and you integrate, and you you want people to be able to book in your your, your calendar for services that you render, you want to make sure that you are you have the right tool that is syndicated into Google for that. So thank you for that Kirsten and 17 hats is awesome. It&#8217;s a great program. Yeah, Kerstin Martin 16:40 I love them Paige Brunton 16:42 similar ish to cure sins, but a bit longer. And so in the two week process, I can do bigger websites, for sure. So websites, normally up to about 10 pages. And then I also sometimes 20 on the client and doing brand design for them as well. So like logos and collateral items, potentially also some setup of some e commerce or something like acuity scheduling for them as well. So how the process works for me is, again, I do a consult call with the clients to determine if we&#8217;re a good fit together if we are a good fit. And they book in their two week time slot by signing a contract and painted deposit. And then from there, I send them a welcome document, which walks them through the whole process of preparing all the different content and completing some questionnaires and completing a Pinterest inspiration board as well. So we&#8217;re really on the same page before we get started. Then in week one, on Monday, we go through and do a one hour consultation call together really just to make sure we&#8217;re on the same page to make sure that we are going in the right direction. And then also to pick a template for them. And then in week one, I actually go and build out the entire website for them. So all my clients have just as same as Kiersten, when you&#8217;re doing a shorter timeline, it&#8217;s important that all the content is prepared before you actually go to begin. And so all the contents prepared, I go through in week one, and completely build out the website. Then on week one on Friday, I send them a link to the summit live website. It&#8217;s live so they can see it, but not live so that the world can see it. And then from there, I invite them to give as many edits and revisions as they want. And so they just send me back normally like a Google Doc with Oh, hold numbered list of the different things they&#8217;d like to see tweaked and changed, I complete those edits in 24 hours, send it back to them. And we basically just keep going through that process again, again, of doing edits until we get it perfect. And then on the week to on Friday, we do an hour and a half lesson and launch call as well. So that&#8217;s where I&#8217;m on a screen shared video call with them. And then I go through and show them the back end of their own websites. they fully understand how to update and added things over time. Honestly, like the vast majority of my clients. Once we&#8217;ve gone through that lesson. I also record the lesson. So if they forgot how to do something, they can go back to the lesson. And And then from there, they are pretty confident to actually take over their website by themselves clients, they always asked me like, Can I work with you in the future if I don&#8217;t know how to do something. And they totally can, they can hire me at an hourly rate if they need to in the future. But mostly, they&#8217;re pretty confident once they&#8217;ve had that lesson, and how to update and edit things. So they&#8217;re pretty self sufficient, actually, by the time I hand it off. And I think that just speaks to how easy Squarespace is to use. And, and that&#8217;s why it&#8217;s so possible for them to update and feel confident with their website afterwards. Brad Good 19:15 Well, we follow very similar design principles. As both of you, I really got my business started in in customizations. I personally don&#8217;t design a lot of sites, I do a lot of custom integrations. I work with a lot of design companies that businesses have hired. And now they have a Photoshop file of many, many pages. And they&#8217;ve decided Squarespace is appropriate. So my job is to implement that design. So a little bit different relationship. But I do have designers on my team and we do collaborate together, the process is very similar to understand the style their competitors, starting with a template really just kind of a streamlines the process rather than starting from scratch. Sometimes people want a design that&#8217;s not that doesn&#8217;t look like a template, but you can really do a lot starting with a template. Well, Ray Sidney-Smith 20:12 thank you, all of you for for going through your process. I think that really helps people understand what the various stages of launching a site even with a website builder, there is still a clear set of work that needs to be done by the business owner and by the designer. And you both obviously need to collaborate in order to make the website go live. I think many times people think, Oh, well, I&#8217;m going to hire someone to, you know, do my website, and then they kind of, you know, wipe their hands of the issue and walk away. And, and really, I have to impress upon everybody the importance that this is a collaborative process, there&#8217;s work on on everyone&#8217;s part to really make a great website launch. So let&#8217;s go on in the conversation to maybe some of the challenges that you find that when you when you have a client, you you, you know, you have your ideal framework for how you&#8217;re going to work through your process with your clients, but there&#8217;s still going to be hiccups, what do you feel like are the biggest business challenges or the biggest challenges that business owners face when they come up against launching a site? Kerstin Martin 21:21 Well, I find it is actually what we have just mentioned, and what you just summarized it is often content, I find that a lot of my clients, they do actually struggle with getting their content together, or they don&#8217;t really have a vision of what they want. You know, I often I mean, I usually ask them, you know, they get a questionnaire as well in the beginning. And, and one of the questions is, you know, send to me, you know, three to five examples of other people&#8217;s websites that you like, you know, so that I get the sense of, you know, what their styling preferences are, but very often, I find at least with, with some of the people that I work with, because I work with a lot of small brick and mortar businesses as well. They&#8217;re not necessarily very technical and and they really and they just really don&#8217;t know you know, and they say well, just make me something beautiful You know, and so but i i have to say, though, that I find, you know, for me, that is actually part of what I enjoy as well. And I actually feel that as a designer, I see it also as my responsibility to help them as best as I can in that respect, because that&#8217;s why they hire me because they don&#8217;t really know always what they want. And so I work with them and and I try and get as much information as I can. I also work with a copywriter that I recommend unless you know, a client already has someone that they prefer to work with. So if they really don&#8217;t know what to do with their content, and how to write something, then I refer them to to the person that I work with. And so they collaborate and then I know that I will get, you know, really good content, but sometimes it also transpires you know, I often start with the design and just put in something so that people can actually see it. And once they can visualize the demands of one sec to see it on the page, then it&#8217;s like, Okay, this is what you want, this is what you need, you know, so it is very much a collaborative effort every now and then I will have a client who&#8217;s super prepared and wonderful, you know, and, and, you know, but I find with most clients, the content is, is probably most challenging for them. And, but, you know, we work through that too, together. And, and then when you hand it off, you know, like page said earlier, the ease of use of square space is a revelation to a lot of them as well, you know, although not all of them do that either. I mean, I have definitely some very technophobe are not technophobe. That&#8217;s not a very nice word. But clients who who are just you know, not that interested, you know, in learning the technical side of things, and how to update a patron, all of that, you know, so they, they just come back and and then I do it for them, you know, on a maintenance agreement. But content I find is probably the the biggest challenge. Paige Brunton 24:43 So I definitely agree with Kirsten, I think content is one of the biggest challenges for clients when you work with a web designer, all the tech and all the back end, and everything is taken care of for you. So contents, one of the last things that clients have to work with. And it can be difficult because if you&#8217;ve never written anything for a website, or gotten photos together, you don&#8217;t don&#8217;t really know what to do. And so I noticed for a lot of my clients are running into the same roadblock issue of not really sure what exactly do I put on the page, and then they see it the first version, they go, Oh, so what I started doing was I run a course called square secrets. And it basically takes people through the process of building your own Squarespace website. And in that course, I have page content planners. And at some point, I realized that it would be very useful for me to give these to my own clients. And so it basically is like a sort of guidelines of what you want on every single page and sort of walks you through the process of what to put where. And so I started actually giving that to my clients. And the other thing which I find, I don&#8217;t think clients realize how important it is. But we web designers definitely know how important it is, is really great photos. And if you have fabulous photos, and you even you DIY your website, you&#8217;ll probably have a pretty decent website, if you hire the most skilled web designer in the world. And if the world&#8217;s most terrible photos, it&#8217;s still not going to look good. So the other thing, which is definitely on the clients end is getting that content together. And that really can make a big difference to how well the website looks, looks and functions. At the end of Brad Good 26:05 it. Really, I agree with both of you photos and content or a challenge. I do think it&#8217;s kind of under estimated how much content drives the design of the site, there&#8217;s a lot of considerations and structure. And a lot of times a company will hire us to design something. And like you mentioned earlier, Ray, that they kind of want to wash their hands and just let us do our thing. But it is a collaborative process. And then there&#8217;s typically multiple people on the other end, making decisions about what makes sense. And that really draws out the the timeline, but it&#8217;s really content and just kind of understanding what they&#8217;re trying to promote and sell. And I&#8217;ve had clients who are really misguided in their own business. And kind of looking into them, Ray Sidney-Smith 26:58 we tried to kind to reorient their focus to what actually makes sense from a from a client end, oftentimes, they&#8217;re just so focused on what they&#8217;re doing as a business. And they&#8217;re busy that they don&#8217;t really have the the time and understanding of how the internet works, and how people are going to be able to find them. So I think content is the big, big issue. And what is so do, what do you recommend, usually for clients to do? Do you recommend for them to write their content and pages up front for for their main pages? Do you recommend for them to do some of that heavy lifting before they meet with you for those who know what they want? I hear what you&#8217;re saying, Brad where they may have some misunderstandings of their business fundamentally. And and that thing that I think takes more bespoke consultation. But for those who do know what they want, do you really recommend that they do some of that work up front? Or do you recommend that they do it along the the process with you, Paige Brunton 28:00 if a client I would suggest getting in touch with a web designer, because getting in touch with a web designer is going to be the best way to figure out what exactly it is that you need? And so get in touch, talk to a few web designers that you&#8217;re thinking of working with and ask them very specifically, like, okay, the clients who come up with the best websites, what are they doing in terms of content? Like, what do I need to know and sort of guide me? And what do I need to know about content for my website, because I&#8217;m happy to give recommendations just like as many as I possibly can, because I want to be building fabulous websites. And if clients have great content, that makes my job a lot easier. So I would say reach out to a few web designers and get them to give you recommendations on exactly if they have some sort of resource that they can provide you like page content planners, or if they have guidelines, on photos, in my welcome package, it goes through those things like guidelines on which photos you should be taking in, if you were to get photos, if you haven&#8217;t already had some done and you could buy stock photos, you could get professional photos taken or you could DIY them yourself, I would suggest really between the stock photography or professional photos. And unless you are just an exceptionally skilled photographers, and that&#8217;s great. And by Yeah, otherwise, one of those two, Kerstin Martin 29:11 similar to page and also Brad, you know, I provide a document that outlines you know, photos of the same thing, you know where to get them, you know, listing stock photography websites, recommending that they get professional photos, if they can, you know, I I also do a fair bit of photo editing myself or people have my clients. I&#8217;ve also used my own photos, I have my own library and because visuals alongside the the text content as page mentioned earlier, are very, very important, especially with Squarespace. Squarespace is such a visual platform and, and, and it provides such amazing tools in order to really, you know, stand out visually and some so that&#8217;s really important. And so the clients, you know, I find, you know, also questionnaires really help clients, you know, if the, even if they kind of have an idea of what they want providing them with a detailed questionnaire, you know, simple questions like, what are your favorite colors, you know, what kind of fun to do you like, you know, the, like, script font or just really simple clean font and, you know, give me other websites like website examples. And so really helping them, you know, guide them towards what you need from them in order to create a website for them. Brad Good 30:39 I do think it&#8217;s, we&#8217;re in a good time period where there is a lot of online resources, stock photography, different libraries are popping up all over. But in terms of content specifically, I think it does depend on if it&#8217;s a new business or an existing existing may have an existing website. And it may just kind of be a result vamp of that content, if it is a new business, just kind of evaluating their competition and then starting a dialogue with them that kind of differentiates their product from their competitors. But I&#8217;m sure these little outlines really are advantageous to for Ray Sidney-Smith 31:18 kind of disrupting this whole design process. I heard all of you talk about the visual nature of Squarespace sites. And so I&#8217;m curious to dig in here a little bit in the sense that you do work in a very visually niche industry, website development, you know, you&#8217;re working as a creative and design professional, but also with other creative and design professionals. How does that affect your process, working with Squarespace as a as a platform as a piece of software restricts your ability to do certain things appropriately, you know, it&#8217;s not, it&#8217;s not for it&#8217;s not a bad thing, that it gives you structure. So how do you, how do you work with that you know that is Nunley image, but also video content today being how important it is to online marketing, to digital marketing and to and especially to small businesses who may not be very comfortable in the video space, what are what are some of the things that you use to accommodate people on a website builder like Squarespace. Kerstin Martin 32:19 For me, this is actually part of the beauty of Squarespace because you have the templates in also, the templates are, you know, the predefined containers, and, and they have, you know, a lot of different templates that you can choose from. And so, once you know, you know, what your client needs, some are, you know, some need more visuals than others, then you can choose the appropriate template, and then you basically customize it to, you know, for that client. And so, in many ways, Squarespace has already done a lot of the groundwork here in also, they have already so you already have your page structures, you know, kind of in place and certain effects, you know, for instance, the, the parallax effect that is very popular, it says, you know, we have like the, the scrolling images, and also, embedding videos works very well with Squarespace. And so I actually find that, you know, having the templates takes a lot of the, you know, potential upfront work out of out of it, as you literally just take that and then you just have to add your photos and your videos, and, you know, and then you customize it appropriately. And sorry to interject here, Kirsten, but just to the people who are listening Squarespace provides the templates they&#8217;re built into the platform are you&#8217;re only able to use the templates in Squarespace not external ones. You will see like if you google Squarespace templates there are actually you know many people nowadays who sell Squarespace templates. But what they actually do is they take one of the built in templates, and then they sell you the process on how to make it look a certain way in also. So yes, so the templates are built in. So it&#8217;s not like with WordPress, where you can go out and not buy a template from all the numerous, you know, providers you have to use. Your basis is always one of the built in templates. And Squarespace has like, you know, like 1015 template families. And then within those families, they have different designs. And and I actually, as a designer, I only work with two or three templates most of the time, and because the clients that come to us, they don&#8217;t really care that much. You know, do you use Brian? Or do you use Bedford, you know, they don&#8217;t care about that technical quality. They just care about how it looks. But they&#8217;re all always the built in templates. Yeah, Paige Brunton 35:06 thank you. for that clarification. I&#8217;ve linked to the Squarespace templates in the show notes. So for those of you who are listening, you can hop right over there and jump over to the Squarespace templates page when it comes to content on your website. So video, text, photos, whatever. And the build of your website is really the way to correctly do it, I should say is to let the content of your website determine the layout, and flow and everything of your website. So when it comes to me building websites, actually delete every single thing off the template and just start from nothing, pretty much. So you can just delete all the pages. And then you let the content for your website guide, what goes where, as opposed to you fit in your content into some template which already exists. So when it comes to photos, you definitely want Generally, if you&#8217;re working with a photographer, or taking them yourself, or buying stock photos, you want photos that makes sense horizontally, or that are taken horizontally. A lot of vertical photos, you&#8217;ll notice on websites, it depends on if people are looking at it on desktop or on mobile. And but for the most part, you really want photos that work well horizontally. And it&#8217;s also good to have photos which have you kind of in a way, I would say like photos of nothing like having banner images, or things that are just sort of like not really in the forefront of the importance of a section of your page, but are just they&#8217;re just sort of visual interest. So like backgrounds for banner images, and they don&#8217;t actually need to be very busy. But you just want photos that sort of have sort of the look, the style, the vibe, the colors that you want to sort of guide your website and horizontal photos, you generally need a few more of those, if you&#8217;re having like an about page photo that would make sense vertically. But for most the images, they&#8217;re going to be used as banner images. So you want them to be especially if we&#8217;re going to be putting text or anything over top the images of your banner images, you don&#8217;t want the images to be too busy, you actually want them to be a little bit more like toned down and calm. Especially again. One other thing which I see sometimes as if the image has text in it, like say, you know, take a photo of a book or something that has text on it. And then you put text over top of that it kind of looks messy. So you want very like clean images. And Ray Sidney-Smith 37:13 by by horizontal you mean taking photographs in landscape as opposed to portrait? Yes, correct. Brad Good 37:21 I&#8217;m gonna kind of piggyback on that comment. Desktop versus mobile makes a big difference in image presentation. And that&#8217;s kind of what she&#8217;s talking about landscapers portrait, not all photos even though they look great work on both will say platforms. Desktop is usually a lot wider phones are narrower, Squarespace does a good job of kind of automating the optimization of images. So they load quickly. But depending on the template you&#8217;re using, it may crop the image in an inappropriate way you can, there is a tool to kind of reset or the focus. But I&#8217;ve written many scripts and tools to either adjust the cropping or recently I worked on a yoga website. And the designer that I worked with wanted completely different pictures for mobile and desktop. So I was able to hide and show the content area based on what device you&#8217;re using. And it made the design look a lot better because of the images were appropriate for for each platform. Can you tell a little more for us Brad about space, how it holds up in the the roster of you know, just out the box, its ability to be properly search engine optimized and flexible for mobile load speed, and mobile responsiveness. So in the templates, there is in the background header information in the code. Thank Squarespace is doing a pretty good job of best practices overall, with meditation, eggs and data attributes throughout the templates and, and the content sections. And they&#8217;re doing it in a way that really keeps it automatic. The Content Manager doesn&#8217;t really need to worry about it. There are things to know and understand about the concepts to maximize the benefit. But kind of as a generic product. I guess Squarespace is constantly evolving. I mean, even on the blog they offer and page for super fast loading Ray Sidney-Smith 39:36 blog pages. So for listeners amp is it stands for accelerated mobile pages. And it&#8217;s a it&#8217;s a, it&#8217;s a program that Google has really pushed for being able to display content very, very quick on mobile, Brad Good 39:49 correct, any image that&#8217;s uploaded, it gets reset, or there&#8217;s versions of different sizes of the images. So if you&#8217;re using a thumbnail, it&#8217;s not going to look have a really huge images, just going to load a small image, everything&#8217;s compressed, all the scripts and CSS are bundled. So the HTTP requests really are minimized as much as possible throughout the application or throughout the website. Great. Ray Sidney-Smith 40:18 So they&#8217;re doing they&#8217;re doing a competent job of eking out speed and and format for users to be able to put out websites that are mobile responsive, and fairly well optimized. So people can basically focus on content, I think I&#8217;ve heard you all say that pretty much from bigger, which is that Squarespace really allows you to focus on the content Brad Good 40:40 correct. I will add one more thing, the content owners can get really heavy with images and video, which does affect loading speed, and SEO and kind of everything. So that is a thing that Squarespace can&#8217;t really have a handle on is how much content images, all that page total is on each page. But Ray Sidney-Smith 41:03 collectively, they&#8217;re doing a really good job, right. So it really behooves the the person who&#8217;s creating the page by page content to remember that even if you have a really great mobile responsive website, if you put dozens and dozens of photos on it, it&#8217;s still going to way down the page. That&#8217;s just a reality. Squarespace has a reputation of being a do it yourself or DIY platform. So I&#8217;m going to kind of softball this all to you and say, what&#8217;s the value in paying one of you to work on a Squarespace website? For me as a small business owner versus me going to squarespace. com signing up and trying to do it myself? What What, what are the real value propositions that each of you brings to the table to level up my website launch? Kerstin Martin 41:51 This is a question that&#8217;s that we get a lot as well, you know, people email you Well, you know, do I really need a designer, I would say, Squarespace is definitely a great dry platform for those people who are a little technically minded, who enjoy designing, and, you know, and who don&#8217;t mind, you know, doing the work, you know, because even though it&#8217;s, you know, kind of an out of a box solution, or it&#8217;s, you know, it advertises itself as that, you know, there is still work that you have to do. And, and I would say, if you enjoy that process, if you enjoy not learning, you know, because there&#8217;s still a learning curve as well. And if you enjoy that, then by all means, you know, have a, have a go at it yourself. And, and many people, I daresay, many younger people as well, you know, the younger generations that we cannot take grew up with the internet. So I see, though, that in like, the older in quotation marks in our generations, you know, for them, it&#8217;s not always that easy. And, and they just really, you know, and they often don&#8217;t want to do it either, actually, you know, they say, Well, you know, I know, I could maybe do this, or I have quite a few clients who have tried to do it, and they just found or, you know, domain, how do I connect my domain, for instance, you know, and they just, you know, because then you have to go and update your DNS records, and they don&#8217;t understand that, and they don&#8217;t really understand how all of that works. And so there are quite a few stumbling blocks that they experience because it&#8217;s not just a question of plugging in some content and add uploading some photos, which, by the way, it should be uploaded, you know, in the correct size and format. And so there is quite a lot that goes into it. And, you know, and nothing, some business owners say, Well, you know, what, I don&#8217;t really have the time I don&#8217;t have the inclination or the time to do this, you know, I, I&#8217;m running a business, or I&#8217;m starting a business and trying to grow it, I want to focus on my business and on what I do best. So I&#8217;m going to hand off this, this part of it, you know, because this is really not my, my strong point. And so they go and find a designer and from my experience, and I&#8217;m sure Brad and Paige would agree with that every client that I&#8217;ve worked with, they&#8217;re like, Oh, my God, I&#8217;m so glad I did this, I&#8217;m so glad I hired you. Because you really talks a lot of people really stress over the web&#8217;s websites, because it&#8217;s such an important part of a business nowadays, and, and there&#8217;s so much more that goes into it, you know, like I said, it&#8217;s not just a question of pictures and text, you know, you have to check your SEO, you have to make sure you know, to get into Google, and you know, that you get listed. And there are so many peripheral elements to designing a really good website, you know, where and people visited, they get the information that they need about your business, they&#8217;re able to contact you easily, they&#8217;re able to find you. So I think, you know, there&#8217;s definitely a lot of value in handling all of that off to someone who is a professional and doing this. Yeah, Paige Brunton 45:26 I love what you said, Kirsten, I also have lots of recommend or recommendations as well, I guess. And so one of the major benefits to hiring a web designer is they&#8217;re going to really help you again, we talked about, like, the importance of content, and sort of like knowing also related content is knowing what Google does with your website, in terms of SEO, how they&#8217;re reading, it affects how you should be creating your content, and uploading their content to your website. So if you want someone to sort of advise you on those best practices for getting that content together, and SEO and that&#8217;s definitely going to be beneficial to have a web designer instead spending hours googling it yourself. And also another reason is a lot of people when they DIY website, well, it is totally possible. And what they tend to do is they tend to find a template, and then they plug their content into their existing layout. And a lot of everyone says, like, I don&#8217;t want my website to look like everyone else&#8217;s website. But when you do that it is true, your website is probably going to look like everyone else&#8217;s. And the other issue is that people go into the templates page, and they find a template which sort of looks like their business. So there&#8217;s a demo template, which shows a yoga studio is the demo content, and then all the yoga studios choose that template. And then, of course, you&#8217;re if you and another studio in your town, both use Squarespace, you&#8217;re probably choosing that template and your websites are going to look you&#8217;re really similar to each other. And so it really is best to actually delete all the content at the template and then start from scratch. And most people when they DIY their website, they don&#8217;t know how to do that, and how to really utilize the platform best. So they just use the demo content or just swap there into those places. And the other thing is, you might have an idea in your head of what you want to create, or how exactly you want your website to look, which is fabulous. But it can be very challenging if you&#8217;re new to the platform to sort of know all the functionality in order to make that happen. And so a designer, they know the platform backwards and forwards. If someone shows me, I want this, I can say very specifically, like, yes, that&#8217;s possible. Or if it&#8217;s not, it&#8217;s not often. But in now. And again, there is situations where we can&#8217;t do something, maybe they&#8217;re showing an example of a website. That&#8217;s not Squarespace. And there&#8217;s one function which isn&#8217;t possible. And so if you want to have exactly what you want, in your mind, created on a page, a designer is really going to help you do that, because they&#8217;ll know how to do it. Or they&#8217;ll know that it&#8217;s not possible, and so that they can give different recommendations. And then the last thing I would say is, if you&#8217;re a business owner, I&#8217;m a business owner. And there&#8217;s some things that I&#8217;m great at, and others that I&#8217;m terrible at. And I just don&#8217;t want to spend any time on. And so if your focus is just on running your business, and you have 99 other things going on, and you don&#8217;t want to I&#8217;m a web design expert, then it&#8217;s definitely a lot of my clients. What they say is, I just don&#8217;t want to look, it says, I don&#8217;t want to become a website expert, I don&#8217;t spend hours doing this, I just want to focus on my business and have someone who knows what they&#8217;re doing, do this for me. And so that&#8217;s one of the major benefits is you just get to hand over your content, and then give some feedback. And that&#8217;s all you have to do. So yeah, Unknown 48:21 I&#8217;ll say to that Brad Good 48:24 budget affects this decision a little bit as the DIY. And like both of you mentioned, understanding the features and limitations of the Squarespace kind of drives either the template or even using Squarespace collectively to move forward. And I think hiring an expert to help evaluate the templates and the product can definitely save time. Overall, there is kind of a lot of hidden little SEO components. And if you&#8217;re having a website and you want to be found on the internet, those are definitely driving factors. I know I work with a lot of DIY clients that are 80 90% done. And then they kind of raised their hand and need some help and evaluating their website, they haven&#8217;t named images appropriately, all the the site description information is empty, there&#8217;s a lot of things to kind of understand. And a lot of these people don&#8217;t have time to learn the system. So it really is best to hire someone who does this on a day to day basis. Ray Sidney-Smith 49:39 I really appreciate those points for hiring a design professional like you all for implementing a website on Squarespace or any other website builder for that matter, I meet with approximately 50 to 100 new, you know, business owners on a monthly basis. And many times it you know, requires was to pull up their website to talk about their digital marketing. And in honesty, those websites typically don&#8217;t look very great. And I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m a much bigger function over form person. So it doesn&#8217;t necessarily harm my aesthetic sensibilities. When I think about a website that doesn&#8217;t look good. But I know how important it is that even if if function is over form form is still highly important in the sense that should at least be competent. So for those of you who are listening, your design aesthetic, your visual, you know, taste may not be that of your target audience. So you have to really take to heart the fact that your, your taste may not be good for your business. And in terms of choosing that and by having an outside third party, look at your website, who is skilled and who works with a lot of websites, that really helps that&#8217;s a that&#8217;s a value you can&#8217;t not incorporate into your business. So you really need to think about having someone look at it, even even if you you think, Oh, well, you know, I could do I why this myself and, and it&#8217;s going to be fine, it&#8217;s going to save me a whole bunch of money. But the reality is, is that how much money are you going to leave on the table by having a site that when your target market shows up to it, they leave it because they they don&#8217;t find it to be appealing, they don&#8217;t find it to be laid out the way that you really would want it to be for them to want to buy from you. So just just take that to heart. Because at the end of the day, your website is so much of of your first impression of people&#8217;s, you know, finding out and learning about your business and you want that to be a good first impression. Paige Brunton 51:39 I&#8217;m going to give a little bit of encouragement, I know that websites can be an overwhelming and confusing topic. And but once you finish this, I&#8217;ve talked to people who have been meaning to do their website or redo their website for years. But once you do this, it&#8217;s going to be the most fabulous relief you your business, your business will start marketing itself as opposed to you having to hit the pavement and doing this yourself. And you also feel so much more confident in your business. So well, it is a big task, I do encourage you not to drag it out for forever, and, but to really handle it head on. Because once you finish this, you&#8217;re going to be so much more capable of marketing your business in the future and so much more confident. And that&#8217;s going to do really good things for your business. Ray Sidney-Smith 52:18 I think that Squarespace has a great platform for many small and large businesses, but understanding the limitations as important before investing the time and a product that may not work for your business. So going back to the last question, it is helpful to understand and evaluate the whole big picture of what your business does, what the web platform is able to offer, and just make a decision based on kind of those facts. Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you all so much for this content. I think this will really help people who are in the process of of looking at their websites and deciding you know, do I need to revamp refresh relaunch my website or if it&#8217;s a new entrepreneur and they&#8217;re thinking about getting their business on the web currently, roughly half of all businesses in the United States at least still don&#8217;t have a website and so if you&#8217;re listening to this and you don&#8217;t have a website listen to page you know you can do this and it will be a remarkably wonderful addition to marketing your business how can folks find you so actually Kerstin Martin 53:28 a very easy way to find all three of us is to just google Squarespace web designer because all three of us on page one so but to go to my website so it&#8217;s basically just my name Kirsten Martin dot com and Kirsten is spelled k er st i n Martin Mar ti n dot com and there you will have all the information on you know my bad design services and I also have for online courses in square space as well for those you know who do actually want to go down the DIY route so all the information is on my website Paige Brunton 54:10 yep so my website is page Brunton calm also my name so PA, I G br you N to N calm and I also run an online course again like yours and if you want to go the DIY route then and you want the knowledge on how to do that correctly and you can find that at square secrets calm as qu a sec or ETS calm and find me in both of those places. And my website is my name as well Brad Good 54:37 Brad good dot net B ra di g o d dot n et on there, you&#8217;ll find kind of an overview of my business. What we do, there&#8217;s a really simple contact us question at the bottom that funnels right into my project management system where we can kind of evaluate the type of requests that&#8217;s coming in, and we can get the appropriate team members kind of associated with design or custom implementation. But all of that is through my website. Brad. Good. Ray Sidney-Smith 55:07 Well, thank you all. Thank you so much for joining me here and providing your insights about Squarespace to our small business audience. This closes out another episode of weapon beyond cast small business owners, entrepreneurs and community I really found our expert panelists insights into the website builder platform Squarespace helpful and I hope you did too. In the next show. I&#8217;ll be bringing another expert panel discussion on website content management system or CMS, known as WordPress. We talked a little dirt about them today in contrast to Squarespace. It&#8217;s a big beast of a topic and I&#8217;m looking forward to sharing this episode with you and I&#8217;m looking forward to hearing back from you regarding your questions and thoughts on Squarespace as well as WordPress. As most of you know, I&#8217;m really passionate about WordPress and love sharing how WordPress can help small business but of course I am more than happy to talk about Squarespace. Shopify wicks Weebly, you name it. If you have class, your comments, please go to web and beyond cast calm forward slash contact will answer them here on web and beyond cast, and we may even make a show out of your suggested topics. So always happy to take suggestions. Please subscribe via your favorite podcast app, review us on iTunes or Google Play or wherever you listen to the podcast that helps us grow our small business community here on weapon beyond cast. So thank you. Thank you for listening to web and beyond cast or small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond. I&#8217;m your host Ray Sidney Smith. Until next time, here&#8217;s to your small business success on the web and beyond.

Getting Your Website Content Together for Launch; Website Content Growth Welcome back everybody to episode 003, which is part two of a five-part series on building a website for your small business, kicking off Web and BeyondCast. I&#8217;m Ray Sidney-Smith and if you haven’t yet listened to episode 002, which is part one in this series, with Ryan Cleland of W Street Design, I highly recommend that you hop back an episode and check it out. I’m pleased to bring the voices and intellect of this expert panel of content writing specialists on the show today, to discuss getting your website content together for launch and planning your website’s content growth. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://webandbeyondcast.com/003 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) On this episode, we discussed and answered the following questions: When approaching a new website, what are some good suggestions for getting organized to write your website content? What other collateral needs to be written alongside the website content? What should you plan for when it comes to your website growing? Blog? Resources? Podcast? Etc.? What are the pitfalls you see website publishers make when launching a small business website? And what solutions can you suggest? What are the most common errors you see people make before and just after their website launches? Should you write your website content yourself? Should you hire a writer? If you hire a writer or an agency to produce the website content, what information should you be prepared to provide to them? What do writers need to know to create your web copy? If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). If you have a question about today&#8217;s episode, please contact us here! In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Beth Lawton, Canoe Media Services Beth Lawton is a recovering digital journalist who has worked in the Midwest, Caribbean and the Washington, DC area, where she now resides. She is now founder and owner of Canoe Media Services, a content marketing firm that focuses on helping small and growing businesses become better known, more liked and more trusted by their current and potential customers. Her team handles social media, blogging, email marketing and website redevelopment for businesses in the DC area and beyond. She graduated from Washington University in St. Louis and Northwestern University. Stacey Morris, Focus Copywriter Stacey Morris , of Focus Copywriter, has been in sales and marketing since she was 16 years old, when she started traveling around the country demonstrating kitchen gadgets at state fairs. She’s settled down since then, preferring to write copy and content from a comfortable office. But a few of lessons stuck from those years: It doesn&#8217;t start with what you sell &#8211; it starts with you. You&#8217;ve got about 7 seconds to get someone&#8217;s attention before they disappear&#8230;forever. And educating your prospect is about the best investment you can make in building your base. That&#8217;s where content marketing comes in. But, she hasn’t fully left behind her roots in direct sales. She still travel to a few fairs, coaching salespeople and marketing new products. So she really means it when she says helping small businesses grow has been a lifelong passion for her. Tara M. Clapper, Express Writers Tara M. Clapper, Content Development Specialist, Express Writers Tara is a prolific content creator and an accomplished editor, having written and edited thousands of blog posts, small business websites, and other inbound marketing content. Tara enjoys blogging about quality copywriting, content management, corporate culture, personal branding, and networking. She runs an online community about women in geek culture and keeps her storytelling skills sharp through LARP (live action role play). Tara also holds a Bachelor’s degree in English and enjoys mentoring new writers. Bringing a decade of experience in publishing digital content to the Express Writers team, Tara focuses on providing quality content to clients as a content development specialist. Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Creating a Buyer Persona (template) Test My Site With Google Answerthepublic.com (keyword research tool) Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360ed10d" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360ed10d" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360ed10d" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360ed10d" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Voiceover Artist 0:00 Welcome to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond with your host re Sydney Smith. Welcome back Ray Sidney-Smith 0:11 small business owners, entrepreneurs and community to Episode 003, which is part two of a five part series on building a website for your small business kicking off web. And beyond cast. I&#8217;m Sydney Smith. And if you haven&#8217;t yet, listen to Episode 002, which is part one in the series with Ryan Cleveland of W street design, I highly recommend that you hop back an episode and check it out. I&#8217;m pleased to bring the voices and intellect of this expert panel of content writing specialists on the show today to discuss getting your content together for launch and planning for your website&#8217;s content growth. And so I want to bring onto the show with me three content writing specialist three content marketing specialists who can help us understand and really uncover the secrets of launching a website with really great content and doing so affordably and effectively for your business. So I have Beth Lawton, Stacey Morris and Tara and clapper here with me on the line. Beth Lawton is a recovering digital journalist who has worked in the Midwest, Caribbean and Washington, DC area where she now resides. She is now founder and owner of New Media Services, a content marketing firm that focuses on helping small and growing businesses better known, more liked and more trusted by their current and potential customers. Her team handle social media, blogging, email marketing, and website redevelopment for businesses in the DC area and beyond. She graduated from Washington University in St. Louis and Northwestern University. Welcome to the show, Beth. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. Absolutely. Stacey Morris has been in sales and marketing since she was 16 years old when she started traveling around the country demonstrating kitchen gadgets at state fairs. She&#8217;s settled down since then preferring to write copy and content from a comfortable office. But she hasn&#8217;t fully left behind her roots in direct sales. She&#8217;s still travels to a few fairs, coaching sales people and marketing new products. So she really means it when she says helping small businesses grow has been a lifelong passion for her. Welcome to the show, Stacey. Stacey Morris 2:19 Great to be here, Ray. Thank you. Ray Sidney-Smith 2:21 And last but not least, Tara clapper was a content development specialist at Express writers. Tara is a prolific content creator and an accomplished editor. She runs an online component community about women in geek culture, and keeps her storytelling skills sharp through Lark live action role play, Tara also holds a bachelor&#8217;s degree in English and enjoys mentoring new writers bringing a decade of experience in publishing digital content to the Express writers team. Tara focuses on providing quality content to clients as a content development specialist. Welcome to the show. Tara, Tara Clapper 2:57 Thank you so much for having me here. Ray Sidney-Smith 2:59 Great to have you. Great to have you all on the on the show. And so I want to just get right into the conversation we have a lot to talk about. And I&#8217;m really, really curious as our audience is about what advice you have for them about content marketing and getting content ready for their websites. So I wanted to start off and kick off the conversation with approaching a new website project. That is, there&#8217;s we, you know, day days zero, there&#8217;s no website, we are thinking about starting a website of, you know, for our business, and we have no idea what to do, how do we how do we go from that point to sort of organizing the content for a website. Unknown 3:39 So when you go to create content for a new website, before you even start writing anything, you should really be thinking about your business itself, the type of people you want to reach your goals and how you&#8217;re going to accomplish those goals. So the first, the first step, I think, is to really have a conversation with your team and to look at your business plan and to think about the goal of your website, is the goal of your website to convert customers? Is the goal of your website to get them on your email list to send them resources to engage current customers? Or is it all of the above? You know, is it a very specific audience? And if so, who is that audience? Who is your Who is your buyer? What is your buyer persona look like. And that should drive the purpose of the content for your website that should kind of determine what you put on there. You know, I&#8217;ve worked with like, auto industry specialists. And it&#8217;s really different creating content for somebody who&#8217;s writing a car repair shop website, they want to be friendly to customers, and they don&#8217;t want to be overly technical. They just want to make sure people know, like, hey, you&#8217;re frustrated, your car needs to be fixed, let us help you out, versus somebody who&#8217;s manufacturing specific auto parts to sell a car dealerships because those people just want to read the technical specifications, how long until I get apart for the car, they&#8217;re not interested in, like, you know, super engaging blog copy about how these parts are going to make a car run better. So it really depends on your audience, even within the scope of the same industry, Beth Lawton 5:18 it&#8217;s great to have the goal of the entire website in mind, then when you&#8217;re a little bit further in the process, it&#8217;s a really good idea to ask, what do I want people to do when they get to this page on my website? Do you want them to contact you? Do you want them to buy something? Do you want them to share the website contact with her friends, having a goal on every page in mind, when you&#8217;re writing will really help make your website content more effective in terms of getting people to do what you want them to do. Ultimately, Unknown 5:49 the key when you know when, when approaching a new website is definitely to know your prospect and to know your message and the action you want your prospect to take. And then I would ask people, I sometimes ask people to just give me like a basic architecture or outline of the pages they want, you know, just list five pages you think would help you and I can, you know, I can, I can help you with that. And then bullet point though, the one or two messages you want to get on each page. So it&#8217;s like an outline for each page, as well as the whole website, Unknown 6:21 how do you all think about the idea of the website copy and other collateral copy that needs to be written alongside the website, I tend to talk to my clients about the the reality that while you&#8217;re getting copy written, you might as well think about how that copy is going to be used in multiple places. Because from at least from my perspective, as a, you know, talking about web marketing, I&#8217;m more concerned about search engine optimization, and making sure that we don&#8217;t have duplicate content on the web. But that web content can be used in printed material without concern. So I&#8217;m curious about how you have that conversation with clients about writing content for the web and other places, as opposed to just for the website, it&#8217;s a really great opportunity to use a website relaunch or initial launch as almost excuse to look again, that you&#8217;re offline marketing materials, because you really want the tone and the flow to match the website, you&#8217;re delivering the same message across platforms, to whoever your target audiences. So it&#8217;s a really great idea to give your offline marketing materials of refresh at the same time is the website I&#8217;ve also talked to a lot of clients about launching a new website is a really great excuse to get into video that does require some writing as well in terms of having a video scripts storyboard having your target audience and the goals in mind. And a lot of experts have said that people like doing business with people they know like, and trust and video is a really great way to make that connection with people for your website. So we have a lot of those conversations about the role is print material, video, photography, TV, blogs, articles online, offline, talking about having everything reach the same goal with the same tone and the same message, I&#8217;d Unknown 8:16 say it is a very good time to assess all of your different marketing platforms. You know, I mean, a website design or redesign is huge. And the way that we&#8217;ve looked at that, actually, within expression writers for our own website is we&#8217;ve really kind of narrowed down our industry specific marketing, because we serve clients in a variety of industries. And we took a good look at our writers and what we produce, and we decided, Okay, we have some really strong, you know, finance industry writers, let&#8217;s target that market and go to those types of events and really engage with people within an industry. So, through redesigning the site, and putting different categories on there for different industries, we learned, like it actually changed our whole event marketing strategy. So definitely, you know, be open to expanding, you know, your reach there. And, and by the way, for small businesses looking to save money, there are a lot of low cost and free events, if you&#8217;re looking on the industry specific level or just locally, like your local Chamber of Commerce events. And so, you know, since we have a limited event marketing budget, I found a lot of opportunities when we redesign the site for industry specific content and the marketing materials followed from there, you know, we took some of the copy that we use for for those individual industries. And then we went ahead and wrote those for industry specific marketing flyers, like for agencies for for banks, that kind of thing, and kept the branding consistent, printed them out. And I take those two events all the time, and they&#8217;re really useful. Yeah, absolutely, Stacey Morris 9:59 totally agree with Beth and Tara, everything we were repurposed when it comes to writing. And it really when it comes to collateral, it depends on, you know, the website owners budget and their goals as well. One of the easiest things, you know, we always recommend us to have all their material, downloadable reports, or you I love the idea of video video gets, it can get a little expensive, I also produce video, you know, depending on where they&#8217;re going, they are so much that can be used and just repurposed very inexpensively. So I encourage my clients to, you know, to cut a shoot for the moon, when it comes to this stuff. So Ray Sidney-Smith 10:38 naturally brings up this, you know, this concept for me about having a resources page or a blog podcast, a YouTube channel, some other mechanism for being able to create regular content that&#8217;s being put onto your website. Because for those you of you who are listening, putting more content on your website, on a regular basis equates to Google the other search engines sending you more web traffic, presumably, if it&#8217;s valuable content, that&#8217;s the driving force behind putting content on your website and having a content marketing strategy. For those of you who are on the line with me, I&#8217;m curious how you approach that conversation with customers when they know or don&#8217;t know that they need to get their website content marketing strategy in place, what what&#8217;s sort of the first step for them in thinking about and planning out the content marketing strategy for ongoing marketing. Unknown 11:35 So once they get website, copy and place or a plan to have that created, then I advise looking at the long term strategy for a blog or a podcast or whatever they&#8217;re producing. But I would I always advise clients to think about how frequently they can produce because I&#8217;d rather see them purchase a blog plan where they&#8217;re only posting to, you know, a blog every other week versus trying to get something out that&#8217;s lower quality every week, you know, I want to see that consistency. And I want to see them really invest in in content that displays their expertise rather than fluff. So I&#8217;ve seen the trend go towards updating less often, but updating still very consistently and having longer forum blog content. So 750 words minimum, you know, ideally over 1200 words. And this is, again, it can vary depending on the industry and your goals. But I&#8217;ve seen the trend towards longer form content, even if that means publishing less frequently, as long as it&#8217;s consistent quality over quantity is the name of the game. Now, one of the things that I do to kind of draw out those those posts and that content marketing plan is to ask business owners, what are the 10 questions that you get from customers the most often? What are those questions that you feel like you answer for somebody every single week, because those can be really great jumping off point for web pages or blog entries, podcasts video whenever you want to do that. And it ultimately can make their life easier, because then they can say to a customer, oh, I have great information about that on my website. Here&#8217;s the link and it&#8217;s a good way to time spread that information and continually use your website as a resource for your customers is to answer those questions that you get all the time that come up really commonly, and use your website as an explanatory tool for them. I&#8217;ve done so far as to tell clients to create short URLs to those main pages so that they have the ability to say, go to my website at www dot my business name dot com forward slash keyword. And it takes them to those pages. And they, you know, sort of have a cheat sheet that they have to each of those pages so that they can say, Oh, yeah, that&#8217;s the question we get all the time, go check out this blog post I wrote on it, or this FAQ has this particular you know, answer to it. So, really great suggestion. Beth. The key Unknown 14:04 in my mind is to stay in touch with your with your clients. And I think blog posts are really the most effective and efficient way of doing that. But of course, it depends on it depends on what you&#8217;re selling. You know, if you&#8217;re doing exercise, then video, maybe the best way to stay in touch. So we really the content, the format depends on the business of the client. But the key is staying in touch. And I and I agree quality over quantity as long as there&#8217;s consistency. Yeah, it&#8217;s Ray Sidney-Smith 14:37 something that I&#8217;m frequently when I do workshops and seminars for the SBC or other organizations. I&#8217;m always harping on this fact that I want business owners to think of something in terms of either a blog or some other kind of regular process for getting content on their websites. And, you know, I inevitably get that question of, I&#8217;m a colonoscopy just how do I launch a video are those kinds of things you&#8217;re you really you really do bring up a great point though, Stacy which is that you know, the the medium that you use the media that is going to present your business really does have to have a natural sort of affinity to the content that you&#8217;re providing, just because I&#8217;m picking on colonoscopies here. But if you if you do do if you are a doctor, medical doctor that deals with sensitive medical issues, or, you know, if you&#8217;re in a legal field where you might be dealing with some sensitive legal issues and those kinds of things, Unknown 15:34 you don&#8217;t have to talk specifically about what you do, per se, think from a more broad perspective of how you&#8217;re answering general questions. And you might have to supplant that with, you know, maybe B roll or stock photography is not of you doing what you do, but representing more what you do, you know, it&#8217;s sort of like when, when I see those health and wellness blogs, and they show those pictures of like a lotus. And this thing is sort of a representative of the health and wellness concept. And those those economic those icons and iconography really create that sense of what you&#8217;re talking about, as opposed to being the actual thing, do you all have any suggestions in terms of how to deal with some of those sensitive topics, like when people are talking about health and medical issues, or other kinds of areas that might be too sensitive or too taboo to show I have worked with both health and wellness and financial professionals in the past year or two. And they do have a lot of concerns and health and wellness as HIPAA and privacy in financial services is all the regulations that they&#8217;re dealing with, in terms of what they can and cannot produce for content. So we really take a success stories approach to what they&#8217;re writing on, we make it completely anonymous, one time, this doctor had a patient who came to them with this issue. And here is what they did to help solve it. And making it very research that we&#8217;ve done the same thing with financial services, that, again, anonymously, talking about a life insurance consultants, client who came with this issue and how they felt it. So you think examples is a really good way to go, their storytelling is very effective in terms of showing how you can solve a problem and making content relatable. And there are ways to do it while working around the privacy and the regulations in certain fields focus on Unknown 17:29 empathy, not just addressing the customers pain point, but letting them know that you really kind of have a handle on their concern, you know, you don&#8217;t have to disclose any kind of personal information to get across the fact that you&#8217;re sympathetic as a lawyer to somebody who is faced with a DUI or you as a doctor, understand what it&#8217;s like to go through the diagnosis process and see 20 doctors before you even start to get an answer are a doctor that understands what you&#8217;re going through, or your frustrations, you know, what the healthcare system so I think empathy is a really important tool to use when you&#8217;re trying to communicate that kind of information and expertise, without disclosing any private information, or without getting into the specifics. Because when people go to doctors, or even like Home Repair Services, lawyers, dentists, they&#8217;re frustrated, they&#8217;re worried about money topics like foreclosure to, you know, there&#8217;s a lot of emotions of all involved there. And you really want to make sure that you come across as understanding and empathetic because that can really separate you from the competition because the other people are going to be blogging about interest rate, or all the horrible things that can happen to your body if you have an undiagnosed illness. And you can just, you know, really reach out and say, Hey, I get how you feel, let me help you out. Unknown 18:56 I&#8217;m a big proponent of case studies and testimonials in testimonials, you really have to be careful these days, especially in the health and wellness market. But honest testimonials can convey some of that empathy and can convey some of that I get, I get your story, I understand where you&#8217;re coming from. and case studies or success stories, whatever you want to call them are, are fantastic because their stories and they engage readers. So both of those go a long way toward educating your consumer Ray Sidney-Smith 19:25 I have been on my own little soapbox when it comes to the high professions, lawyers and doctors and so on so forth. What we know from lots of research is that the attorney in private practice, probably after five years of being in business, they mostly get their referrals from other practitioners from other legal practitioners who refer them that business. And so in some of those environments, healthcare and other things, those business owners might think not about having a consumer based blog audience or podcast audience or video audience but it colleague based audience talking directly to other colleagues as being their target audience, something to think about, just because I think everyone tends to think about it from the perspective that Oh, yeah, I&#8217;m going to talk to the people who are going to hire me. But you might also think about in your in your content marketing planning, who is going to refer me the most customers and potentially speaking directly to them. So I think that all of these things are really great. But also recognize that you might have multiple audiences that you might want to talk to, and that sometimes the direct client audience is not the audience that you should create content for. Unknown 20:37 Absolutely. And that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s where, you know, it Express writers we have what we call authority content, which are these like, you know, really high level, well researched pieces that are the best pieces of content we can produce. And that&#8217;s really to show that you&#8217;re an influencer or and or an expert in your field of study. And so if I had a class come to me and say, hey, look, you know, I want to reach these consumers. But you know, I&#8217;m a doctor, and I also want to address my colleagues or impress, you know, a medical board or something like that, what do I do, then I would steer them towards authority content, where they can really showcase their expertise. And of course, that&#8217;s that kind of increase in reputation isn&#8217;t going to hurt when it comes to the consumers either, you know, obviously, you want to go to a doctor who knows what they&#8217;re talking about, you would hope you would hope Ray Sidney-Smith 21:32 so. So I want to shift gears here in the little bit of time that we have left in talking about some of the potential problems and pitfalls that small business owners see or experience when they are producing their content, or even planning for their content, what are the what are the big ticket problems that you see happen in the process of creating content, and how can entrepreneurs and small business owners and so forth, mitigate those risks mitigate those problems on the backend clutter is Unknown 22:05 number one clutter is, and that means clutter, in terms of the look and feel of the site and also clutter. In terms of the messaging. A lot of times, web owners want to put it there, just throw everything on their homepage, figuring something should resonate. And to me, that&#8217;s a big mistake. It makes your site look like $1 store. It&#8217;s cluttered. It&#8217;s too many elements on one page. And it&#8217;s overwhelming to your visitor. Unknown 22:31 So I would agree that writing too much or trying to fit too much on the homepage is definitely a big issue. When when you&#8217;re writing for the web, you really have to remember all those eye tracking studies that show that people really skim when pages and when they find something that catches their eye, then they start reading. So it means that when you&#8217;re when you&#8217;re writing, you really have to think visually, in a way using visual cues to draw people to the important parts whether it&#8217;s bullet points, Petters, certain words and bold, something like that to really kind of guide the readers I as they are skinning. The other thing that I&#8217;ve seen is tone, we worked on a website redesign for a financial company, and their old website was really about themselves, and how great they were. And with the new website, we really tried to flip that and change the tone of the website from bragging about themselves to bragging about how they help their client. So it&#8217;s switch from saying, we do this the same, we help you target audience accomplish your goal. So keeping in mind your audience, and whether you want to help them or tell them how great you are kind of what the goal is keeping the audience in mind, there can be a really big issue as well. Yeah, Unknown 23:51 the other thing I would add is just in addition to cluttering the homepage, they list all of their services on a general services page, really, you should pick your top services and kind of list those each on their own page. And that just call it something general like services, which is part of a larger problem that a lot of small business owners don&#8217;t invest time or money into, like, figuring out what search engine optimization is, or how SEO is kind of crucial to building a website. And SEO isn&#8217;t everything. But if you have you make a critical mistake. Like if your website is not mobile friendly, it&#8217;s like you&#8217;re throwing money out the window, because your site needs to be mobile friendly to be found. So you know, just making sure you work with the right developer or the right content creator, to ensure that you have, you know, keyword research done that your site&#8217;s going to pass all of Google&#8217;s tests and big requirements, that your content creator is not throwing, like shady links into your site, you know, you you need to make sure you trust who you&#8217;re working with. And you need to do a little bit of research on on search engine optimization, before you really invest money into into that content, or just, you know, hopefully, you could work with with one of us on this call to create reputable content and high quality well written content that also ranks well in Google. Because just ignoring that, and throwing money into creating blog posts for the sake of creating blog posts is not a good inbound marketing strategy at all, you know, definitely have like a rhyme and reason to everything, you do a purpose, every piece of content, and it doesn&#8217;t always have to be backed by, you know, this whole long list of keywords or something like that. But it&#8217;s something to keep in mind. You know, I I like to use a good combination of a keyword research list which, you know, we turn into a content plan and I also try and grab things like, what do customers ask what are their pain points, I use a site called it&#8217;s a free site called to answer the public COMM And you can type in any subject matter and it&#8217;ll tell you what people are actually googling and asking about that topic. So you know, you always want to be be in line with what your customers need. And not just kind of throwing throwing content on your site without doing any sort of research as to what people actually want to need to see nifty an avalanche media did a an infographic some time ago, where they put a bunch of research up and 77% of website traffic lands on the homepage of a local small business on a local business. And, you know, I think there are reasons for that, I think, you know, if you&#8217;re a top ranking local business, Ray Sidney-Smith 26:39 you&#8217;ve probably done a lot more advertising that drives traffic to people typing in your domain directly, or googling the name of your business directly and finding you. But the other side to that is that even if you are not, you know, one of these top local business websites, in the in the country, you&#8217;re still driving a lot of people to your homepage, and the the wall, it&#8217;s not the end all be all, your homepage does really need to focus on the fewest and the best customers, your your navigation is going to be fine in terms of things. And I fully agree, Tara on the idea that you need to really have separate services pages. So people know that you your tailoring tailoring a service or product directly to them as opposed to this panoply of things that they will just get, you know, sort of the Paradox of Choice, they, they have too much choice and therefore less likely to buy that homepage really doesn&#8217;t need to be focused on the largest customers, the best ones I see are, you know, those websites that have like three big sort of images, and they&#8217;re targeting those three audiences, you know, your teacher, your parent, your student, right, and click on one of those three, and it takes you into that area of the website that answers that that speaks to your issue, as you said earlier, target speaks to their pain, it deals what their issue and now you can, you can entree them into their own experience. But as much as you can slice and dice the content you&#8217;re creating on the website, and giving the target audience a view that means something to them specifically, the better you are at being able to convert them in terms of sales, or whatever your call to action is. So I really appreciate all of your thoughts there. And I wanted to I wanted to close us out with with a with a discussion about when the right time is to write the content yourself and or hire one of you three ladies to go ahead and produce the content outside of you. What what what ends up being the decision factors for business owners that decide that they are going to hire someone to create content versus doing it themselves, it depends on so many factors. I have clients to write all the time and they&#8217;re okay at it. I have clients who haven&#8217;t written anything since college. So it really depends on whether you get writer&#8217;s block, whether you like writing a lot of factors like that. But regardless, when he was working in journalism, and editing other people&#8217;s work, I always reminded them that even Pulitzer Prize winners had editors. So it&#8217;s really important, Unknown 29:19 even if you do write a content yourself, to get someone else to read it to make sure it&#8217;s understandable to make sure that for your target audience that they know what you&#8217;re talking about, and you haven&#8217;t fallen into jargon that they might not know. It&#8217;s also important for grammatical errors, it&#8217;s very difficult to edit yourself, even when you are good at it. And even when you do it professionally, I have people read things that I write even. So it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s critical to have a second term eyes, regardless of whether you&#8217;re doing the writing yourself or not. Unknown 29:51 And objectively, I think to like, the objectivity of having somebody else create the content can really help. I mean, I noticed some amazing writers who have reached out to me, and like heavily published writers, very successful people, as well as content marketers who are really good at what they do. And they reach out to me and say, Tara, can you write my bio, because it&#8217;s really hard to be objective about yourself, or your own brand, or your own business. And my response is, usually, I&#8217;d be happy to do it, don&#8217;t even pay me just write mine. Because we all have, you know, that, that same issue with, with writing about what we&#8217;re involved in every single day. So, you know, having that that, like, removed perspective can really help tell your story. And, you know, we were talking about that before that storytelling is central to your success, and getting your message out there. And sometimes, you know, you need a little help doing that, even if you&#8217;re good at telling your own story, you&#8217;ve got to bounce it off other people. I mean, I talked about, you know, what we do at our business all the time. But, you know, I have conversations with other people on our organization before I just go off and like, talk about our message and storytelling and what we can do for brands, at conferences and stuff. Because, you know, you kind of have to get that message together within your organization and practice it before you present it. It&#8217;s something to, to really work at. And it&#8217;s definitely worth considering working with a professional writer or an agency to get that done, you know, cuz, cuz storytelling is what they do. I&#8217;ve had the most success with clients, when when clients come in and say, Okay, well, I&#8217;m a really good writer. Um, you know, but I don&#8217;t know if I&#8217;m doing this, right. And if I find that to be the case, and that they are already really good at telling their brand story, I usually ask them, you know, what, give us an outline of what you want on this page, give us some facts to us, or like a story about, you know, how you have the customer send me like, the raw data, because raw data isn&#8217;t just numbers, it&#8217;s these experiences, and you want to make customers, you know, feel that you&#8217;re really invested. And they want to see that example. So send us that that&#8217;s something that I can&#8217;t produce for you. Unless I know about it, it&#8217;s your business, not mine. So when they send us just like an outline, or a bullet point list, our writers can produce some amazing content for them, because they&#8217;ve supplied us with the raw data, and we are telling the story for them. And that really seems to be the best way to collaborate between a writer or an agency and a client, if they already know what they&#8217;re doing. We&#8217;re just here to make the story shine, you know, it&#8217;s, I can&#8217;t really make up a story for you, it&#8217;s your business story. So, you know, there&#8217;s that and if the client doesn&#8217;t understand what their story is, or, um, you know, or anything like that, and that that can, that&#8217;s not just for beginners. It&#8217;s not just for people of small businesses. But even big corporations sometimes don&#8217;t even know what the brand messages you know, it&#8217;s the writers job to really do the interview and pull that information out of the business because you&#8217;re not just telling their story, you kind of need to help them develop their brand a little bit in order to get that good web copy for them. Yeah, you know, Unknown 33:08 the truth is, most of the people we meet with can write just fine. But they tend to get paralyzed when they&#8217;re writing for their for their own sites. And the truth is, few people know, you know, the basic storytelling skills and copywriting skills or what the key most important message they need to get out there is, you know, when you&#8217;re right in the middle of it, you may not know what is most engaging for your audience. And an outside voice can come in and tell you, you know, this is this is really what resonates with your clients that stick with this. So it&#8217;s not so much the writing, it&#8217;s the it&#8217;s the beyond the writing, it&#8217;s the getting the clients engaged. It&#8217;s the growing the website, it&#8217;s growing the tribe, if you will. And that&#8217;s where a professional writer can be very handy. Ray Sidney-Smith 33:58 I think it&#8217;s really important for people to think about the issues that come into play, whether or not they can create writing. I really love the idea of Beth about at least having someone who&#8217;s going to edit your material. And certainly taking sort of a bird&#8217;s eye view of what it is that needs to be done in terms of the content that you&#8217;re producing, you know, really, it ends up being so many times your first impression with a potential customer or potential audience, the target audience member of some kind, and you don&#8217;t want it to be your last impression. So if it&#8217;s poor, and so I just wanted to thank you all Beth Lawton, from New Media Services, Stacey Morris, and Tara clapper from Express writers thank you all for being here on web and beyond cast with me today. Unknown 34:44 Thank you is great. Ray Sidney-Smith 34:46 There you have it. Small business owners, entrepreneurs and community regarding what to consider regarding content creation for your website launch will have many more discussions in the future about content marketing, but this is so important to think about where the you have a website already or if you need to refresh your website content. Now after listening to this episode, I hope you gained something of value from our website content expert panelists. In our next episode, I&#8217;ll be bringing you a discussion with in quality of website sugar to think about the website builder platforms available to you when launching a business website. It&#8217;s going to be a great conversation. I&#8217;m looking forward to you joining me on that show. If you have any questions or comments, please leave those on the episode page at web and beyond cast dot com forward slash 003 this episode number or by going to web and beyond cast dot com forward slash contact and filling out the form there. Also, please subscribe and review us in iTunes to help us grow the podcast audience. Thanks for listening to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond. I&#8217;m your host Ray Sidney-Smith. Until next time, here&#8217;s to your small business success on the web and beyond.

To start off Web and BeyondCast, we are beginning with a series. We’re going to touch on a topic that’s near and dear to my heart and business&#8211;how to build a website. In this episode we will be discussing principles of good Small Business website design and development. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://webandbeyondcast.com/002 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) In this episode and further on in the &#8220;How to Build a Website&#8221; series, we tackle the following topics: How to approach designing your website How to choose a great domain name (website address or “URL”) for your business How to select and set up a Web hosting account/service for your website/blog How to create and prepare your content for the website/blog How to develop an Editorial Calendar for your website/blog How and what to test, and creating a Tweak-Maintenance Plan (TMP) for your website/blog How to plan out Analytics, Social Media &#38; Mobile components and syndication How to set up analytics and security tools. Timeline to Launch a Small Business Website If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or contact us. Web and BeyondCast is brought to by the support of W3C Web Services, affordable Managed WordPress hosting, domain name registration services, SSL certificates, and more. In this Cast &#124; How to Build a Website, Part 1 Ray Sidney-Smith, Host Ryan Cleland, W Street Design Kenneth Ryan Cleland is website designer/developer operating his design agency, W Street Design in Washington DC. He is a graduate from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and has been creating design materials professionally since 2005. Show Notes &#124; How to Build a Website, Part 1 Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Top Level Domains (TLDs) ICANN SoLoMo Success (book) Country Code TLDs WordPress SSL Certificates Let’s Encrypt Click here to jump out to YouTube to watch “How to Create a Content Editorial Calendar” or view it below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWODFLBY8eA Here are upcoming and an archive of all past Virginia SBDC Webinars in the Google and Beyond Webinar series. Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress Google Analytics Test My Site Google Mobile and Speed Test WPTouch Mobile WordPress plugin Raw Text Transcript &#124; How to Build a Website, Part 1 Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360ef5b5" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360ef5b5" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360ef5b5" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360ef5b5" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > Voiceover Artist 0:00 Welcome to web and beyond cast were small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond with your host re Sydney Smith. Ray Sidney-Smith 0:11 Hello there small business owners, entrepreneurs and economic development agents. Welcome to weapons beyond cast, we have an exciting show for you in store to. So I hope you enjoy the time we&#8217;ll be spending together a little bit about what you can expect from this podcast Show. I&#8217;m presuming you&#8217;re an active small business entrepreneur or owner or you&#8217;re one of the economic development agents throughout the United States or Canada. Welcome. I know that as small business owners and entrepreneurs, you have limited time and resources to spend on paying attention to all that you need to to market and manage your business. And that&#8217;s why I&#8217;ve started this podcast. I already pay close attention to the news and notices coming out of big business, small business and technology including email newsletters, YouTube channels, Facebook, live videos, webinars, blog posts, magazines, ebooks, books more from the top business and tech media experts and technologists. With this show, I hope to bring you the most important as well as the latest news and perennial resources that affect your ventures and provide applied commentary from the community. It&#8217;s going to be great. And I&#8217;m looking forward to having you along on this journey. This podcast is also the first podcast in the small business Podcast Network, a podcast network for small business by small business and you&#8217;ll be hearing more about the SP pn soon. To start off the show. We are beginning with a series how to build a website, we&#8217;re going to start on a topic that&#8217;s near and dear to my heart and business, the website we&#8217;re going to go over the principles of good small business website design and development. Because I think it&#8217;s so important. We&#8217;re going to talk about how to choose a great domain name. We&#8217;re going to talk about selecting web hosting accounts and services for your website, and our blog, how to prepare your content for your website, and our blog and editorial calendar to match. If you don&#8217;t know what an editorial calendar is, don&#8217;t worry, we&#8217;ll provide resources for that as well how to test or what we do is create a tweak maintenance, Plan A TMP for your website or blog and how to set up the analytics social mobile components. And finally, what is really a timeline for being able to get your small business launched. So for this first episode, I have reached out to my network to find the folks and experts who I believe are going to be able to provide those answers along with me in conversation. And so for this show, let me bring on to the show Kenneth Ryan Cleveland. Ryan Cleveland is a website designer and developer operating his design agency w street design in Washington, DC. He&#8217;s a graduate from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and has been creating design materials professionally since 2005. Welcome to the show, Ryan. Hey, Ray. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So what&#8217;s something that I didn&#8217;t talk about in my introduction, that other folks, people who are small business founders and entrepreneurs should know about you? Ryan Cleland 3:02 Well, I&#8217;m quite the versatile, creative, I also do sculpture work in my free time, as well as building a small clothing brand. That&#8217;s great. Ray Sidney-Smith 3:11 And I know you through my work with the SP DC, the Small Business Development Centers based in Virginia, and you do a lot of work with WordPress and small business science. And so that&#8217;s how I know Ryan. And so we&#8217;re going to, we&#8217;re going to get right into it and start talking about these principles of good small business website design and development. And, and so you know, we have five episodes in this series. So some of these topics, we really won&#8217;t be getting into detail in this episode. We&#8217;ll talk about those in upcoming episodes. And I&#8217;ll let you know hopefully, which episodes and what resources you can do to gain access to those as we make our way along. But we start at the top and the top is a great domain name for your business. So some people call this a website address, some call it your URL Uniform Resource Locator. So I wanted to talk about how important it is to have a great domain for your business what are the things that you talk to business owners about when when they come to you and they don&#8217;t have a domain name yet and or they&#8217;ve chosen a really poor name for their business that happens a lot to clients come to me and you know, you have to give feedback so that they can have a successful business, what are the things that you really pay attention to? What are those principles that you really want people to pay attention to when they&#8217;re choosing a domain name? Ryan Cleland 4:29 Well, typically, I try to keep everything short and simple. So if the brand name is not satisfactory, we might consider renaming and in that same process searching for the dot com as well. Ideally, we we select the dot com and the branding is solid. That way, if the dot com is not available, there are other TL DS top level domains that can be used that are more available than the dot com, I usually find that dot coms are taken, which can be a frustrating process, there&#8217;s a number of ways to get around that if your dot com or in my instance I use design for for my business, you can use things like a memorable phrase, it could be part of your tagline something witty, but typically, I tried to keep it short. And I I avoid using dashes and double characters for the sake of the visual word or words that are used. Ray Sidney-Smith 5:29 Yeah, and there and there are some requirements that I can which is the organization that sort of standards crisis standards for web domains. And so you know, you can only use so many different characters for creating your domain name. And I actually I talked about this in my in my book so almost success about the idea that you know, you can only have so many characters in a website domain name, you really won&#8217;t come up against it, it&#8217;s a really long number, you know, string of numbers and letters and characters but the reality is, is that you know, it should really be either your business name which I&#8217;m hoping is what I call brand enabled something that is that supports your brand that really puts your best you know name and business forward but it&#8217;s also keyword rich so really think about the keywords that people are searching and that might end up being the best domain possible and I think that it&#8217;s important for your domain name to be short and there are lots of top level domains and CCT LDS that&#8217;s country code top level domains so look at the, the wide array of those, you know, I run a book club and I chose to use dot club for the book clubs so that people you know, it was taking another word out of the domain name, which made it shorter and it allowed us to have doc club so I think that you have a lot of new options. I think you&#8217;re absolutely right with your own domain w st dot design. You know, I think I think also people are and that&#8217;s my question for you are people becoming more comfortable with those kinds of dot coms that are not dot com. I think Ryan Cleland 7:06 it&#8217;s something that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s becoming more widely accepted. But it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s still in its infancy, I would say Ray Sidney-Smith 7:13 I would agree. I think it&#8217;s still in its infancy. But if you put http colon slash, slash, or www dot, that&#8217;s a pretty good indicator to people that it&#8217;s a web domain address. And that also means that if you if you do choose something that&#8217;s not a dot com, dot net dot biz or dot org, if you are an organization, okay, fine. That&#8217;s, that&#8217;s something that you have to think about. But also remember, just to make sure that you add www dot or HTTP, colon slash slash to the, to the beginning of those URLs, wherever you might place them. That might include business cards and brochures, you know, other printed material and then email signature and other places, you might end up putting your web domain online that might be static text and not a link. So just taking those into account, you can still have a great domain name that&#8217;s not dot com. Because really, you know, websites have been around long enough domain name registration has been around long enough now that people are starting to take up all of the good comms so to speak. And so now we have these new top level domains, but they run everything from dot attorney to dot club to duck designed to dot yoga, all kinds of different top level domains and many domain registrar&#8217;s are now allowing all of these variety of them to take place. So think about how that happens. And then, as I noted earlier, CCT. LDS country code top level domains include the ability for you to be able to create words using those so for example, Facebook has a short URL called shares sh A r dot s dot yes is the top level the CCT LD for Spain so Espana and he s is used as part of the word shares because Facebook uses their shares URL for sharing material so you can actually create these fun words and sort of wordplay with your domain name. If you if it works, you know, don&#8217;t don&#8217;t try and shove a square peg into a round hole here, but you can really do well by yourselves and reduce the number of words and the length of your domain with CCT LDS if, if it works into your well to do generally these new kinds of LDS as well as CCT LD, so I think that&#8217;s all really great. The next big step in being able to get your website up and running is really your web hosting account and or service. And this includes your website, and or blog. And there are so many options out there, Ryan, how do people approach this when they come to you in terms of choosing web hosting and or web hosting service for a website or blog or podcast that they might be launching, Ryan Cleland 9:50 the majority of my clients are small business and they&#8217;re just starting out. So traffic will be like, I don&#8217;t need a lot of space to the site is small search. Typically, I just set them up with the registrar and hosts that I use and I the I the best way to approach this is to keep everything in one place. So typically register my domain or domain for a client in either my business account or their own, which I suggest they maintain their own hosting account and registration register domain name in one space, I just find that to be easier, there&#8217;s no transferring, it saves a lot of time in the long run. Ray Sidney-Smith 10:31 Yeah, when they&#8217;re connected to one another. That means they don&#8217;t have to worry about logging into two separate accounts to make things happen. And typically a web host, who is also the domain registrar can redirect traffic very easily. And quickly. If those changes are being made internally in their own system. Some of the big things that are are things that affect you, as a small business owner entrepreneur is really thinking about the cost of the web hosting, what is it really going to cost you for the amount of space you need for the website you&#8217;re going to run and the amount of traffic the bandwidth as they call it, that you&#8217;ll need for inbound website visitors, you need enough for the number of visitors you&#8217;re going to be receiving. And that&#8217;s just something that you have to guess you really aren&#8217;t going to know that out the gate generally, as Ryan said, you&#8217;re not going to have, you know, huge amounts of people showing up to your website, I had a customer several years ago who was was going to be was going to have the product on TV. So it was going to be showing up on nationally broadcast television show. And so we had to go and up the bandwidth on that particular customers account. So that they would be able to withstand the traffic that would be coming to, to to the business website. So know that you can adjust those things, it&#8217;s not something that static so you can actually adjust those based on, you know, say, okay, for this month, we&#8217;re going to get a heck of a lot more traffic than we were going to before, we need to be able to withstand that. So think about that. And also think about the services the features that the software needs to run. So say, if you&#8217;re going to work run a WordPress installation, which is a content management system. And we&#8217;re going to be talking about that in just a couple of episodes. If you&#8217;re gonna if you&#8217;re going to run WordPress, there are some requirements, you know, it has to be able to run a my SQL database and run PHP and all these other web coding language things. Just be aware that you might have these requirements. And once you make some of these decisions, make sure that your web host can satisfy them. Okay. And so just making sure that they can do that. One of the other things people frequently don&#8217;t recognize, and I&#8217;d be curious about your thoughts on this, Ryan our SSL certificates. So Google is now you know, using SSL certificates, which is the security certificate that is, you know, pairs your website so that when someone comes to your website, they get an HTTPS as opposed to HTTP, you know, website URLs that will show up. And that that secures the information transfer between the web server the web hosting server that&#8217;s rendering the websites and the website visitor their browser. So that actually is something that Google is now saying, Okay, if you have an SSL certificate, you&#8217;re going to get a more secure transaction, which means less, you know, potential for malware and other things. And we&#8217;re going to provide those websites with SSL certificates with greater levels of traffic, we&#8217;re going to send more traffic to those websites. So So making sure that your web host whether the domain registrar or your web host is capable of having that is also pretty important. Ryan Cleland 13:35 Well, one thing I would like to add, I just set up a site using an SSL certificate. And I found something called Let&#8217;s Encrypt, it has to do with more Google supports it more than than other browsers. But if something where you are able to self sign an SSL certificate, it&#8217;s actually free. So it&#8217;s a good way to start with an SSL certificate. Without Dr. spending any money even though they are inexpensive, isn&#8217;t easy setup. So I would suggest looking at that fantastic. And Ray Sidney-Smith 14:06 like I said, you know, as we make our way through the podcast, in this episode, and further episodes, you&#8217;ll see that the links to all of the things that we talked about are at web and beyond cast calm forward slash, the episode number two will be able to find that Let&#8217;s Encrypt linked there. Alright, let&#8217;s move along now to preparing content for your blog. And the editorial calendar. I&#8217;m going to just quickly some of those items, which we&#8217;re doing an entire episode on creating and preparing your content for your website and blog. I&#8217;m going to have some content marketing specialists on the show. And I&#8217;ve actually done an entire webinar for the Virginia SPC network on developing an editorial calendar using a wide variety of tools. So I will put a link to that webinar, the regular webinars that I present for the Virginia SPC network, and so I&#8217;ll link to that episode in the show notes. And I&#8217;ll embed that the video there if you&#8217;d like to watch it as well. So that takes us a long to now the the next step, which is once we&#8217;ve gotten over preparing content, and really looking at the site map and all this other stuff, the sort of ministerial details, we get to this later part in launching a website, which is really the idea of testing it, and then tweaking and maintaining the website. So where do we go with that? Ryan? What How should clients approach the idea of testing their website before it goes live? And then what should they do? Or what&#8217;s your experience with people as they get their websites launched? And what should they look out for? Ryan Cleland 15:38 Well, recently, I&#8217;ve been building WordPress sites solely. And I find that the transfer from one domain to another can be can be complicated. So typically developing on your domain and utilizing a maintenance page, let&#8217;s say is a easier way to launch There are also staging plugins that you can use to help make these launches easier. Ray Sidney-Smith 16:02 I think it&#8217;s really important for, as you said, Ryan, to sort of pay attention to how your web hosting accounts are sort of dealing with those things. That&#8217;s something that you&#8217;re dealing with as sort of a developer. But if you as a small business owner are doing this yourself, if this is a DIY project inside of a WordPress hosting account, be very cautious of that reality that you might run into this hiccup. So you if you have a launch that&#8217;s coming up, you know, you if you plan to launch on x date, just know that you should give yourself a little bit of buffer time for that you could take several days to a week for you to sort of figure out the technical components of making sure that your site transfers from the temporary staging site to your full domain, public domain and public hosting site. Great, great point there. A couple of other things that I think people should pay attention to, when it comes to testing is that you need to go ahead and rigorously visit the pages of your of your website. In that testing phase, before the goes launch goes live, you need to really think about visiting every page on your website. And I and I know for some websites, that might not be possible, because you might have thousands of pages if you have thousands of products. But if you can, you should really just visit every page and make sure that it loads properly. And try it on different computers, you know, so you might try it on a computer at home, you might try it on the computer at your office or retail shop, you might also try it on your phone to make sure that it&#8217;s mobile ready. And we&#8217;ll talk about that in a little bit. And we&#8217;ll also want to try that on maybe the library computer, you know, someone&#8217;s visiting town, they come to a library to quickly login and maybe, you know, check their check out something or they visited from some public network, you should really see what that looks like when somebody visit visits your website from a potentially limited internet access place, right? If this is a good idea, just think about that. The other side is that you should really talk to your web designer or developer about what I call a tweet maintenance plan or TMP. The idea with a TMP is to say, okay, as a part of the budget for launching our website, whether how much money you know, it costs to get the website to developed and launched this extra money is so that if we have problems A day later, a week later, maybe a month later, this is this is that money set aside or given to the designer developer to make sure that things are sort of taken care of, if you aren&#8217;t already signing a maintenance plan long term with that designer developer for updates to the website. So having something you don&#8217;t want to have a website launched, and then the day later a plugin or some other code or something goes wrong, you log into the website and make a change, and the whole website comes down. And now you go back to your designer developer, and you say, Hey, I have a problem. And they say, Sorry, I gave you the keys that&#8217;s on you. And I don&#8217;t, I don&#8217;t troubleshoot. So the reality is, is you need to be able to lean on your web host, your domain registrar, the designer and developer who&#8217;s who&#8217;s working on your site, which means you need to really have those things planned upfront, but you make sure that you have a tweak, maintenance plan of some kind, so that you can go ahead and be prepared for the inevitable it&#8217;s not if but when something will go wrong with your website. That&#8217;s just the nature of the web today, software changes and things happen, you make changes to your website, things go down, be prepared for it, it&#8217;s good insurance. The next step that I or the next set of principles that I think are really important for people to think about are really analytics, security, social media, and mobile. And these really come into the components of really making sure that your site is giving you the information, having the functionality that it needs and is capable of syndicating that content as necessary to the appropriate places like Google or to social media or otherwise. Okay, and these tend to be bundled into functionalities that are either built into the platform you&#8217;re using or their extensions You know, they&#8217;re there are additional features you need to add to that particular website in order for them to work. Do you have any good ideas for people about how they should approach these areas? Ryan Ryan Cleland 20:13 well for WordPress, there is a plugin called Yoast SEO and they help you connect with analytics Google Search Console you can upload all your social media links and it makes you know optimizing your site and being aware of metrics very simple Ray Sidney-Smith 20:31 right so so Yost is is great Yoast SEO is a plugin for WordPress. So if you are on the WordPress platform it does Yeah, it does all of this thing&#8217;s a sitemap it gets your it produces a sitemap which WordPress doesn&#8217;t do natively. And then you can go ahead and submit that sitemap through the Google Search Console using Yost, it does analytics for every page and post on your website. So it tells you whether or not that that page or post is optimized for Google and the others search engines. And it does a whole host of other things. You know, if you&#8217;re not using WordPress, it&#8217;s still important for you to think about getting a Google Analytics account, which means going to google dot com forward slash analytics and creating account and all again, that link will be in the show notes. And going ahead and making sure that you have all of your social media accounts created that you&#8217;re going to be doing and and connecting to your website. So that means going out there and creating your Twitter account, creating Facebook, creating Pinterest, creating Instagram, and so and so forth. So that you have all of those LinkedIn and so on so forth. So as you have them available to you. And they&#8217;re created an established when you&#8217;re connecting them to your website. And and that really just makes it more efficient when you&#8217;re working with your developer and designer. Because you don&#8217;t want to get to that point where you&#8217;re going to do all of that stuff. And then the designer developer has to wait on you while you create all of these variety of accounts. The The other thing you want to make sure as you&#8217;re developing your website is that it&#8217;s mobile ready. Okay. And we are now in a mobile first or what I call think mobile first, first modality in small business, you need to be thinking about how your website and how your brand is viewed as experienced from a mobile first perspective, you should think mobile first, whenever you&#8217;re doing anything with regard to marketing and managing your business today, it&#8217;s just so important, you know, people are on their mobile phones, they&#8217;re experiencing your your brand, usually first on a mobile phone. Now, all the statistics tell us that most searches happening upwards of 80% of search on Google is happening on a mobile phone. So we really need to think about how your website is optimized for that, as a Google Small Business advisor to the Google Small Business team in Mountain View, they have developed a tool called the test my site. So if you go to test my site dot think with Google dot com. And again, that link is in the show notes, you&#8217;ll be able to run your website through it. And it will tell you your mobile readiness, the speed of your website, and some other important factors so that you can correct them if they are, they fall into sort of the, the orange or red zone, right. So the the amber or the red zone of things that you need to correct to make sure that your, your site is optimized for basically desktop and mobile readiness. Okay, so so Google&#8217;s built you this really great tool for doing that. And if not, then there are there are again, there are ways in which you can get around them with your WordPress website, there is what&#8217;s called WP touch a really great mobile plugin. I&#8217;m not sure if you&#8217;ve used this yet, Ryan. But it&#8217;s a very flexible plugin that allows you to be able to turn your your desktop ready website into a mobile ready website. And it does a bunch of sophisticated stuff behind the scenes to make that happen. So make sure that you&#8217;re doing that look at the various social media plugins and other extensions that are available within your content management system. And if they if they don&#8217;t exist, then you need to get them you know, to do that. And this is probably about that time when we talk about two things that I think people frequently forget. One is email, make sure that you&#8217;re connecting your website to email in some way, shape, or form. Okay, so that means getting your email newsletter account created and making sure that you put your email newsletter signup in someplace conspicuous on your website. So people are signing up for your email, we will have a whole series on this topic coming up in I think about 1010 or 15 episodes. So but the other is backup and security. Make sure that your website has some backup or security functionality built in so that when something goes wrong, right, it&#8217;s not if but when something goes wrong, you are prepared with a good backup strategy in place and making sure that you have the security components in place to what we call harden, which is stopping people from doing bad things to your website. You&#8217;re basically using the appropriate hardening mechanisms for doing that. And we&#8217;ll have some discussion about that in the WordPress episode as it relates to WordPress, but you really want to make sure that you do that with any website that you have that you have the appropriate security fail safes in place. Ryan Cleland 25:02 There is another tool that I&#8217;m using now it&#8217;s called mas local, it helps synchronize all your business listings across search engines. They also offer a mas pro suite of tools that helps with search engine optimization seems to be very helpful. I haven&#8217;t signed up for that yet. You know, Ray Sidney-Smith 25:21 Maz is a great organization and they do a lot of lot of good stuff. And there are lots of ways in which you can manage your local listings. And that obviously creates citations, what they call citations, which are business directory listings around the internet, which then can refer local traffic to you. So very, very powerful stuff. So great nod to Ma&#8217;s local, they&#8217;re finally is really the timeline. And I think a lot of people are tentative about starting a small business website because they think it&#8217;s going to take a lot of time, you know, there are different designers and developers and different projects and so timelines definitely very Ryan, how long does it typically take with a client for you to go from inception statement of work and the signing a project agreement to launching the website projects ranged anywhere from a week with clients that are very organized and know exactly what they want to a month and two months, that also depends on the scope of the work what they need the site to do. I typically work in WordPress, so there are there&#8217;s definitely different strategies that can be taken. It&#8217;s just comes down to planning from the beginning. Absolutely, I think I think timeline to launch really is a matter of how well prepared you are, how well prepared the designer, the developer that you&#8217;re working with, and the platform that you choose. And I did a I did a webinar on this topic again, in the webinar archives. And I&#8217;ll put a link to it in the show notes that covers how to launch a website in 24 hours. And so this is not 24 hours from today to tomorrow, but literally 24 hours of work. So it typically takes a small business owner about 24 hours of your own individual work working with the designer developer to be able to get that website launched. Okay. So just think about it being about 20 hours of your time to be able to get the site launched, and that can be meted out over several weeks, or a month or more than that, okay. It just depends on how much you want to commit to making it happen sooner rather than later. Okay, so 24 hours is three, eight hour days, or it can be, you know, six weeks, broken up into four hour into into four hours each week. So you really just need to think about did I do that math, right. Either way, you get my point. You know, it can be broken up if it&#8217;s four hours time, six weeks. Yeah, that&#8217;s 24 hours, right. So the choice is really yours. But that&#8217;s just about what it is. So I&#8217;ll make sure to put that link to the webinar for the sort of checklist for getting your website launched. And that will do it in terms of the principles of web good website design and development. And Ryan, any final thoughts you have for listeners regarding good principles of website design and development? I know we really didn&#8217;t talk about the thematic development and themes and front end design. I&#8217;m curious about your thoughts there in terms of how how the site should really look, you know, what, what should what should the form versus function do, I know that for me, I tend to avoid the topics of design because they tend to be so subjective, but there is a lot that goes into making sure a website looks a particular way. And that usually comes down to what the website needs to do, what its functions are, that really inform its form. Typically, I Ryan Cleland 28:42 prefer to work with clients that are organized from the beginning that they do have an idea, but they don&#8217;t know exactly what they want, they may have websites that they like, or the competition that they&#8217;re working against, which is a helpful way to start, a lot of a lot of problems can be solved just by looking at other sites that are doing similar or performing similar services. Ray Sidney-Smith 29:07 I know that&#8217;s something that people tend to not think about is color psychology or color theory, when it comes to design, you should really have a discussion with your designer developer about the colors that you&#8217;re choosing that are either connected to your brand already or that need to be developed. So sometimes when it comes to design, it comes down to the fact that your business has not yet decided on what&#8217;s called a color palette, right, a series of colors that work together and will be used consistently for the rest of your brand&#8217;s life span. Okay, and, and I&#8217;m sure Ryan, you deal with this all the time with clients who have come and they&#8217;ve used maybe two different colors on this business card, and then maybe these three other colors on their Facebook page, and then these other colors on maybe a temporary website, or on a brochure, or something else like that they&#8217;ve not decided on the series of colors that should really be collected together and only used as one cohesive team in the scope of things. And colors printed and colors on a digital screen are very different. And we need to be able to work with those sets of colors to be able to make that brand consistency happen. So we really do need to think about color, we need to think about consistency of typeface, meaning the fonts you&#8217;re using, both on digital and print, and then what your website really needs to do. Because if your website needs to do certain things, that means that it needs to have a functional design approach versus whether it just needs to be a brochure website that just needs to look pretty, right. And so many times people come at a website design project with a, I want this to look pretty the aesthetics and they they lose sight of the fact that your website needs to be functional first, and then needs to be aesthetically pleasing to the user, meaning getting them to do the action you want them to do, right. So so we want to look at this from a functional design perspective, which is what what design elements Do we need in order to make sure that this is appealing, as opposed to repelling the user to do what we want them to do. Ryan Cleland 31:13 When I run into these kinds of scenarios, I always suggest we begin the planning stage with the brand and and redesign potentially the logo, we work out the colors, the tagline necessary and and start the planning process from the very beginning, which is the core your brand, I think it&#8217;s really important for people to think about the brand as the hub and your website, and your email and your printed marketing materials, and all of these other things as spokes of that wheel. And you really need to make sure that they connect the the spokes connect to your hub and the spokes connect to your audience, which let&#8217;s say that&#8217;s the wheel you know, on the diameter of the wheel. So so you know, it all sort of comes together. And as as one cohesive piece, definitely talking to your designer developer upfront about your website design is going to be really important. Ray Sidney-Smith 31:59 And, as Ryan said, discussing the brand components, color theory and color palette, making sure that you have all of the name tagline and all of his other components really determined before you approach the website. And that way it creates that cascading effect of positive benefits as you make your way through because those design choices will then be conditioned precedent on you making sure that the brand is in place that closes up our time together. Ryan, I really wanted to thank you for being on the show here on web and beyond cast. Thank you. All right, folks. That leads us to the end of this first show of web beyond cast. And I am really, really pleased that I got through this episode. You know, it&#8217;s a lot of work to start a podcast, but those of you who have your own podcasts, you know what it&#8217;s like, but I&#8217;m really excited to continue on this journey with you all with that. Thanks for listening to web and beyond cast were small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond. I&#8217;m Ray Sidney-Smith. Until next time, here&#8217;s your small business success on the web and beyond.

Episode 001 &#124; Introducing Web and BeyondCast Welcome to Web and BeyondCast, a weekly podcast show where we discuss and guide Small Business on marketing and managing on the Web and beyond. This is an introduction to your host, Ray Sidney-Smith and the premise of Web and BeyondCast with some helpful notes about the show. Show Notes Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. None for this episode. Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors. Text with strike-through formatting was in the original recording but then removed in post-production. <div class="rmwr-wrapper" data-id="rmwr-69f4e360f0f88" data-mode="normal" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" data-smooth-scroll="true" data-scroll-offset="0"> <button type="button" class="read-link" id="readlinkrmwr-69f4e360f0f88" data-open-text="Read More" data-close-text="Read Less" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="readrmwr-69f4e360f0f88" aria-label="Read More" > Read More <div class="read_div" id="readrmwr-69f4e360f0f88" aria-hidden="true" data-animation="fade" data-duration="300" style="display: none;" > (voiceover) Welcome to Web and Beyond Podcast, where Small Business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the Web and beyond&#8230;with your host, Ray Sidney-Smith. (Ray) Hello there, Small Business! Welcome to Season 1, Episode 001, of Web and BeyondCast, where Small Business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the Local, Mobile, Social Web and beyond. We have an exciting show in store for you, so I hope you enjoy the time we&#8217;ll be spending together. I know I will. Segment 1 &#8211; About Ray Sidney-Smith I thought it might be a good idea to tell you a little bit about myself since we&#8217;ll be spending so much time together. I&#8217;m a small business productivity technology and Management Consultant and the owner of W3 Consulting training consultancy for small businesses learning about marketing and managing on the web, and we also have a number of smaller divisions that provide a wide variety of services to those small businesses. For example, we have a managed WordPress hosting and domain registration service, very creatively called Web Services.  I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ll talk more about our work with Web Services in the future. additionally I&#8217;m the author of SoLoMo Success: Social, Local &#38; Mobile Small Business Marketing Strategy Explained, published in 2014 and  should have the 2nd edition out in the very near future. Let&#8217;s see what else would you like to know about me?  I am the Google Small Business Advisor for Productivity and what that means is that I I&#8217;m happy to explain to small businesses the power and veracity of using Google products to be able to run their entire business this includes G Suite formerly known as Google apps for work which encompasses many many products and extends to third-party partners and services that can be used within the Google ecosystem. As well, I&#8217;m a Hootsuite Global brand ambassador so if you have any questions about HootSuite always feel free to send those along. And, last but not least,  I&#8217;m in Evernote certified consultant and Evernote is a powerful note-taking software which you will hear me talk about quite a lot on this show. It&#8217;s the backbone of my personal productivity and holding together that which are the spoke personal productivity Technologies like a task manager or project management software or a calendar and cloud storage services like Google drive, OneDrive or Dropbox&#8230;it does everything in the middle. As you might be able to tell, I&#8217;m a huge productivity nerd. So if you&#8217;d like to learn more about my productivity enthusiasm you can always jump out to my personal website which I will link to in the show notes. All Show Notes will be available with links to items we’ll cover here in the podcast, along with a text transcript so you can read and search the contents of the shows. Each episode is numbered (so this episode is 001 as its the first episode) and you can find it by going to webandbeyondcast.com forward-slash and the number of the episode. Alright, I&#8217;ve told you about myself but what I’d really like to hear is from you. Please visit WebAndBeyondCast.com/001 which will take you to this episode if you&#8217;re not listening to it already on the website and feel free to tell me about yourself in your small business there or you can click on the contact page and let me know who are you what do you do I&#8217;d love to listen and hear from new businesses and Veteran businesses. This helps inform my understanding of what kind of content you will want and need to be able to better your business. I fundamentally believe in the power of small business not only in the  National economies in which you provide services and products to your customers but also the power of community among small businesses and so I really do want to know more about you all. Segment 2 &#8211; What’s Web and BeyondCast all about? Web and BeyondCast is an exploration of how to strategically, economically and effectively market and manage as a Small Business in spite of the changing nature of technology. You&#8217;re not a big business with an IT department, a marketing department, a legal department and so on. You need to be nimble and flexible and judicious with your time, money and other resources. I hope to be able to encapsulate the show and roughly 30 to 60 minutes each week. Some weeks will be longer than others because I will talk about some of the timely things that are happening in the news and where I have guest experts, we will probably have a little bit longer episodes to accommodate both news and our interviewees and expert panelists. We will be covering a wide panoply of topics that are important to Small Business Management&#8230; and because so much of small businesses marketing, will have a slight bent toward that area of business. however I do want to cover topics as varied as human resources and legal and Regulatory issues, taxes and finances and many other topics that are important to small business owners. Segment 3 &#8211; Closing out Episode 001 So that&#8217;s what you can expect from Web and BeyondCast and I again want to invite  you to visit WebandBeyondCast.com and click on that contact button and let me know a little bit about you I try to respond to every email that I get from listeners and if you have questions or suggestions for topics you&#8217;d like me to cover please feel free to send those along. I&#8217;m always happy to get new ideas from small business owners because that I know that the information being provided is it value to you. Starting a small business is a journey and starting this podcast is a journey for me as well and so I&#8217;m looking forward to join you on your journey to small business success  and I hope to get to know you along the way. Thanks for listening to Web and BeyondCast, where Small Business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the Web and beyond. I&#8217;m Ray Sidney-Smith. Until next, here&#8217;s to your success on the Web and beyond!