It’s a well-researched fact that more than half of all business startups fail within their first year. Within five years, 95% will fail. Believe it or not, it’s likely not due to a lack of opportunity or good business sense, but rather a lack of the business owner being able to draw enough pay from the business to support his or her personal living expenses.

Let’s take a look at some of the possible reasons why:

You only THINK you’re putting in 60 strong work hours a week.

It’s a given when you own a business, especially a new one, that you’re going to be really hammering away at building it up. Your family may look at you strangely when you come out of your office because you’ve grown three days worth of facial hair or the clothes you were wearing at dinner on Monday night are still on you, stained and wrinkled (and smelly), on Thursday afternoon. But what were you really doing in there all that time?

It’s so easy to get distracted when there’s a computer in the room, or when your brain is so fried and you look around you at the mess in your office and decide to “get organized”. Here’s a little tip, one I’ve recently put to use myself, and it will save you an insane amount of frustration: Pay someone else to do it. I have a friend whose son just started half-day preschool. For two hours a day, 3-4 days a week, she comes over and does “office manager” stuff for me. It’s well worth the money I pay her, and she gets out of the house and makes some extra cash. Those are merely bonuses though - it helps ME focus on the things I need to be doing, gives me the time to do the important things I need to do, and keeps me organized and well… sane.

Sure, everyone needs a mental break, but if you find yourself taking a break from writing sales letters and hopping on to your favorite game website, only to find yourself 4 hours later having done ne’er a darn thing for your business, then it’s time to really put your priorities in check.

You’re not charging enough.

Okay, so you don’t play games on the computer and your office is minimalized and spotless. You’re still working your finger muscles to the bone and cannot make ends meet on the personal side. Consider that you’re truly not charging enough for your services. Oh yes, it’s great to beat the competition in terms of cost, but if you’re already surpassing them in terms of service (they talk to you directly, you’re on top of emergencies, and you meet or beat deadlines consistently) then you deserve to charge more. You’re only worth what someone’s willing to pay for your knowledge and expertise, and if that means driving away “smaller” clients who can’t afford you, well then so be it. You’ll be making room for people who can afford what you’re worth, and using your time to make the most money you possibly can. We’ll get into “firing clients” another day…

You’re not spending your time wisely.

You’ve set your pricing at a responsible level, you’ve got a couple good clients, you’re working 60 hours a week, you despise Solitaire, and your office is something right out of the “after” shot of something on HGTV - but you’re still not paying your car insurance on time.

When you decide to spend time on marketing - what exactly are you spending your time on? If you’re cleaning up your website and buying Google ads thinking that’s gonna cut it for you, you’re wrong. That’s all great stuff to do, but it’s considered “passive marketing”. It’s making sure that in the event someone does find you, that what they see/experience while trying to learn about your company looks and sounds great. It’s making sure that you get noticed on the sidebar in Google. But it’s not proactively seeking anything.

Put it this way: When you were a kid and played “hide and seek”, if you were the seeker, you always tried to be quiet so that the hiders didn’t know you were coming. As a hider, you also kept quiet so that you weren’t found.

Marketing is the direct opposite of the silence in hide and seek. You need to put yourself out there - send emails and newsletters to people you’ve met, past clients, and people you think could use your services. You have to seek them, but you have to do it LOUDLY. Come up with creative ways to offer a discount to past clients for re-signing with you. Write articles and submit them to blogs that revolve around your topic with a polite request/offer for the blog owner to publish it with your name and a link. Heck, BLOG about your business! Whatever you do, stop focusing so much on your maximum PPC bid and start telling people what you’re all about one-on-one.

The bottom line:

You need to make changes NOW to ensure that your business will thrive enough to support your personal life. Don’t wait for the big boom of success to raise your prices, and don’t waste time on things that take away from the things you could be doing to really grow. If your business isn’t making enough to support you, your business won’t make enough to support itself, and then you’ll become just another statistic… and not a positive one!

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Okay, so obviously not all six reasons here will apply to every reader, but it’s a list of things I’ve run across in the past that confirmed not only my thoughts, but that of prospective clients of mine, that it’s time to “start again”.

1. The “last modified” timestamp on the bottom of your page ends in something earlier than 2005. In other words, your site hasn’t been touched in more than 2 years. I could say a month, but that goes more into content than design. “Design” - as a whole - is part of what attracts people to something. Fashion, home décor, art, and web sites are all meant to draw people in via color schemes, lines, shapes, and space. To attract the eye in a pleasing manner. If your site looks like it hasn’t been touched since 1995, is using outdated, boring colors or too much whitespace, you’re going to draw the attention of no one’s eyes, and in fact will likely bore them enough to move on to something that looks more modern and updated. People on the internet FLEE from stale information. If your site looks stale, they’ll think your business and information - therefore potentially your knowledge and experience - is stale also.
2. Your friend’s nephew gave up his web design hobby in favor of a job at the local video games store. Okay, so it doesn’t matter where he got the job, unless it was as a web designer for a reputable web agency, it’s likely that he didn’t do that professional a job in the first place. Yes, I know it only cost you fifty bucks, but is it really the image you want to portray to your clients or customers?
3. The pages on your site are taking too long to load. You literally have less than something like 3.2 seconds to grab a user’s attention. If your images are too big in terms of file size, or you have too many of them, your pages are going to take forever to load, and people are going to click their back buttons or that cute little red “x” up in the corner. You don’t even get a chance to prove to them who you are, what your company is fantastic at, or anything! They’re gone. Wondering why you have no conversions? This could very well be the killer.
4. You need to make some minor changes (pricing, hours of operation, etc.) or additions, but your designer tells you that it’ll take 2 weeks and a hundred bucks or more. In this day there is no good reason (other than to keep raking in your money) that a web agency should be taking that long or charging you that much for minor things like that. Sure, there are great agencies that charge a little less, or give you a faster turnaround, but wouldn’t it be best if YOU could do it, as soon as you wanted, and with little to no “techie” knowledge? If your site were overhauled and built on a content management system (CMS) that’s super easy to use like WordPress, you could’ve had the changes made faster than the time it takes to dial the number of your designer.
5. You got roped into a situation that’s costing you $25 - $50 a month and you don’t even have access to upload files to your site. This was a type of “all inclusive” plan that some agencies offered back in the day (and some still use today), again to keep raking in your cash, that prohibited you from having access to your server via FTP (file transfer protocol), or to be able to make any changes what so ever. For a basic site, you should never be paying more than $8 a month for hosting, and once your site is live, the only thing you should be paying anyone for is to make changes you either can’t or don’t want to make yourself because they’re too difficult. Changing a price of your product should NOT be made to be too difficult for you. You also should have absolute, 100% access to everything on your site, including the server. You’re not a child, and if someone tells you not to play with something because it could break your site, it’s quite realistic to expect you won’t. Yes, I know there are people out there who can’t listen, but for the most part, if you break it, you pay them to fix it, so why would you bother?
6. Your customers have no way of keeping up with you. With the advent of RSS feeds, website subscriptions, email marketing and the like, there’s no reason your customers, or anyone interested in what you do should be kept out of the loop by having to continuously hunt down new information on your site. If you’re not offering to deliver that information to them, how much business could you be missing out on? Get an updated site, with fresh content, and you’ll have people constantly coming back for more.

So there you have it - there are far more reasons why you might need a site overhaul, but if you find yourself falling into any of the above situations, it’s time to definitely consider upgrading your site!

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I get this question all the time from clients who are new to blogging and/or using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress to manage their site content…

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Let’s break that down for a second:

Really - Like, totally, dude!
Simple - We love simplicity!
Syndication - News journalists, comic artists and the like syndicate their content by selling it to various newspapers or article repositories. It’s a matter of making content available to subscribers through various means, and in terms of RSS, means providing content (as a site owner/content creator) for people to subscribe to (through an RSS reader) in the form of an RSS feed.

What’s an RSS reader?

And RSS reader is a program or web-based software that collects and organizes your RSS feeds in one central location. It’s what “pulls the feeds” from the sites you subscribe to and organizes them so you can see what you’ve read or not read, what you might want to read based on category, and so on. Think of it as one gigantic magazine where you completely customize the content, and it updates instantly as soon as your favorite sites update their content!

Let me ask you this: How big is your bookmarks/favorites list? Do you enjoy having to search through it to find the sites you already know you love? How do you know, without actually visiting the site, if there’s any new info there? RSS takes care of all that for you by literally delivering you the content YOU want, when it’s new, and with much better organization than that messy old bookmarks list in your browser.

There are many different readers available, and they’re all differently the same thing.

The one I’m using right now is called, simply, FeedReader. It’s 100% free, and lets me organize my feeds quite nicely. However as I said, there are literally dozens of really great feed readers available.

Two web-based readers are very common: If you’re a Google fan, and enjoy using their tools, there’s always Google Reader. Many use bloglines too. Since they’re web-based, they don’t take up any room on your computer and you can view your feeds from any computer at any time.

All three of these offer some “really simple” (ha!) and easy tutorials to show you the basics of how to use them. You don’t need to be all that “techie” to get it either, they’re pretty uncomplicated!

How do I publish RSS feeds from my site?

One of the easiest and best ways to do this is to use a CMS like WordPress to build your site and maintain your content. It comes with a built-in feed, and essentially means there’s NOTHING you need to do in order to provide an RSS feed to your site visitors except let them know that you offer feeds by using the universal symbol:

That’s it. Whenever you see that icon (it’s usually orange, but some people match the color to the theme of their site, as you can see ours is by scrolling to the bottom of the page) that means that site offers RSS feeds for you to subscribe to at your whim. If your site isn’t built on a platform that automatically offers feeds, you might want to think about a redesign if you want to offer your clients or site visitors the option to get updates from you via RSS. RSS is a great tool for marketing online, as it essentially advertises your site as often as you publish new content, to people who are confirmed as interested in what you have to say!

So there you have it! Now, I’m by no means the only resource out there for learning about RSS, so you should check out some of these other great posts if you’re still feeling a little confused:

How To Explain RSS The Oprah Way
ProBlogger Explains RSS
Beginner’s Guide to RSS and Atom Feeds

Or check out this video recommended by Darren Rowse, The ProBlogger by Martin Neumann of Common Craft:

VideoJug: RSS In Plain English

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