Category: How-To

Customer surveys are critical to any business. Whether you provide a product or a service, knowing what your customers think about your offering and what is missing is how your business can best improve its products and services. But surveys often produce inaccurate results - leading businesses to invest resources in the wrong areas. Eric Almquist and Jason Lee of Bain & Company have a much better approach - and I'm very impressed with its simplicity and effectiveness.

Running a home-based or virtual business can be difficult for many reasons. It's hard to focus, difficult to separate work and home, and harder to appear professional. Here are eight things you can do to make your at-home work more productive and enjoyable, as well as more professional, while still having a personal life.

Designate a Work-Only Workspace

If you are working from the same desk where you pay your personal bills and surf the Internet leisurely, it's going to be difficult to keep your work separate from your home life. Business and personal bills are placed in the same stack, files and papers get mixed up, and there is no mental separation between work and home life. You can boost your productivity by creating a workspace or office that is designated for work only. This will help you mentally separate work and home life – and as a bonus you can write-off a portion of your living expenses to reduce your business' tax liability (check with your accountant).

If you are a small business owner or entrepreneur, you are likely asked frequently to provide a discount on your rates. This is especially tempting during an economic recession where your sales levels are lower than usual. Although some people will tell you to lower your prices or provide discounts to increase business, I believe doing so actually hurts your business financially and non-financially. Let's examine why.

Fixed-Fee projects can be dangerous commitments for service providers and consultants. If you use fixed-fee pricing, I have developed a simple model that can help you account — and be compensated for — your level of risk by using a complexity factor.

The model I use for quoting projects is below using a fake widget-making project that assumes an hourly rate of $10/hr. I'll follow up the model with an explanation of how it works and breakdown its various components.

This approach has really increased my quoting accuracy dramatically - and is pretty straight-forward to setup using Excel.

In the early days of the web, putting in 200 keywords on your page was the norm. I tracked down my company website from 2001 - and here are the keywords I was using:

Graphics, Web Design, Web Site,  Web Page, Frontpage, Design, 3d, Site, Business, e-commerce, entrepeneur, Small Business,  html, authoring, site creation, layout, style sheets, hypertext markup language, web, home page, website, media, communications, animation, marketing, page, designers, mulitmedia, scripts, web sites, html design, PHP, Perl, web hosting,  hosting, hosting services, computer, web pages, web design professionals, web page authoring, graphic, new website, new web site, Web master,  web page designer, web site designer, webmaster, webmasters, web masterst, web designing, Professionals, dhtml

Yes - that was on ONE page! The sheer volume of keywords became popular because search engines used to actually use this information to rank pages. Now - keywords are virtually useless when used in this way. Instead, there is a much better way to choose and place keywords on your site - and it's proven to be very effective for me. I call it the 3-1-2 rule.