The CEO’s Guide to YouTube

Posted on by Darren Dawes

Every CEO or business owner should understand the marketing role of their YouTube videos.


YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine and YouTube videos should be a part of every company’s advertising and marketing strategy. However, your corporate videos are probably not optimized or really, doing anything to promote your B2B sales.

 

Below, we’ll show you ten easy steps to multiply your company’s exposure using the videos you already have.  But first, we’ll show you why it’s important!

 

 1  Minute About YouTube and Your Business

Let’s get started with a “10,000-foot view” of what every CEO and business owner needs to know.

  • YouTube is now the second-largest search engine in the world behind Google Search itself.
  • YouTube is an excellent tool to reach new customers, even if you are in the B2B sector.
  • Google Search often shows a preference for video in their search results (why you can see videos right under the paid ads).
  • Your videos on YouTube can rank at the top of search results, leapfrogging your competition even if they have a head start.
  • Your videos should be showing up in your customer’s search results, acting like free commercials, but for this to happen they have to be set up correctly.
  • Your competitor’s videos can actually suggest that your video plays next if you set them up properly. Conversely, you can ensure that your competitor’s video won’t show after your own.
  • It is likely that your existing videos are not properly configured to show up in a Google Search.  This is because your marketing people are not specifically, YouTube experts.  We know this because the vast majority of corporate videos are not properly configured.
  • Properly configuring your company videos only takes about 20 minutes for each video, but most companies just upload the video and do nothing else.
  • Your existing videos should be optimized before spending a dime on other types of advertising! If they are not properly configured, the job is only half done!

 

If you’ve read this far, you may want to spend 5 more minutes on our YouTube action list.  It shows the steps you need to take to correct the configuration of your videos.  There is nothing for sale here, you only need to follow the outlined steps.  However, if your team needs outside help, we are happy to show them how!

 

Our 5 Minute YouTube Action List

If you implement the items in this action list, your videos will be 90% optimized for YouTube.  This will cost you nothing to implement…as long as your people execute.  If they have not already done these things, it’s probably because there is a hole in their knowledge and they did not realize it.  Don’t blame your employees, just ask us for help.

 

If you have existing videos on YouTube or elsewhere, you probably paid an agency or employee to produce them.  These videos should be working as FREE commercials that pop up when your customer tries to solve their problem.  It amazes us that most companies will spend big money on paid search results (like Google Ads or Trade publications) before optimizing this FREE advertising.  Even giant corporations miss these points.

 

To see if your videos are properly configured, go look at your YouTube channel and check the following:

 

  • Is the title something your customer would search for, or does it say something like, “(your company) promotes their T1000 machine”? Put yourself in your customer’s position and think about what they would search for.  Although keyword research is useful here, that is a subject for another discussion.  For now, let’s focus on immediate improvement.
  • Is there a video description and is the title included at the beginning of the description? If the title is “T1000 Milling Machine Makes a Widget” the description might start with, “in this video the T1000 milling machine makes a coupling joint out of 2024 aluminum”.
  • Are there three hashtags (example: #T1000 #millingaluminum #machining) in the description area?
  • Does the video description link back to a page on your website (even better if that page is specifically about what is shown in the video and contains a form to submit the viewer’s info)?
  • Are there instructions for how a customer can reach you (in the description OR on the page the description leads to)? Be specific with an email or contact form link.
  • Do your videos make use of voice narration?  You can double the effectiveness of any video, by adding narration.  A professional narrator costs about $20 on Fiverr and the spoken audio helps YouTube know what your video is about.  It also makes the video a LOT more watchable by the viewer.  Think about it, when was the last time you watched a TV show with music-only audio.
  • Are the keywords relevant (you can’t see the keywords in the YouTube app, but I’ll show you how to do this below) and are some of them related to the title of the video?
  • If you turn on closed captions, is there a transcript in your preferred language (or does it say “auto-generated”)? Google looks at the transcript to “learn” what the video is about.  Auto-generated captions can contain misleading information, like in this video (which has NOTHING to do with Pandas…)
the importance of correcting auto-generated text

It’s important to correct the auto-generated cc text. This video is not about Pandas! It should say, “Ace Bandages”

  • Have you generated captions in other languages?  Your audience may not speak English.
  • Do you have your YouTube videos embedded in your website? Did you shut off the feature to play suggested videos? If you don’t, the last thing your customer may see is your competitor’s video.  Add “?rel=0” at the end of your embed frame to correct this.  For example:

 

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/XLtPd-Yu-Ws?rel=0” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

This will allow your other videos to be suggested when the viewer watches a video from your website.  Not knowing how to shut off suggested videos is one of the reasons many companies say they do not use YouTube.

 

  • Do advertisements play during your videos? It can confuse your customer when an ad plays, or worse, lead them to a competitor.  Shut this off in the advanced channel settings (unless your channel is designed to make money from views, in which case, you probably already know this).

 

Bonus:  See the keywords your competitor uses on YouTube

Keywords are subject-related words that help a customer find your website, or in this case, help YouTube to find relevant videos.  That way, when they show a video, they can locate other videos with similar content that will interest the viewer.  Remember, it is YouTube’s goal to keep you on their platform as long as possible, so they can show you advertisements.

 

To see the keywords that were used for a video, use the Chrome browser to view the YouTube video page.  Right-click your mouse and choose “view page source” to look at the page code.

How to View Page Source

Now search for “keywords” on the page and when you find it, examine the words that appear in brackets after “keywords”.  This is what the person who uploaded the video entered, to help YouTube classify the video.

 

How to view YouTube keywords

If you have a strong competitor, it’s likely that they are targeting some of these terms with their other forms of digital marketing.  They might even be using your company name in the keywords to lead your customers to their videos!  This might give you ideas for your own keywords!

 

Conclusion

If you execute the steps shown above, you can start to realize a significant exposure benefit from your videos.  If you don’t think it’s that important, look at it this way:  would you pay to produce a radio or TV commercial and then hide it in your desk?  Of course not, but that’s the digital equivalent of what most companies are doing.  The good news is you can use the steps above to quickly get the “commercial” back in circulation to drive new business!   If you need some help or want to have an outside professional evaluate your current situation, please contact us at Info@SixFootLever.com

Darren Dawes
No YouTube channel yet?  Let us help you create a channel on YouTube for business, the RIGHT way!
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A Lack of Website Content May Kill Your B2B Company

Posted on by Darren Dawes

Your technical website “content” is the difference between showing up in the search results or fading into obscurity.

The “content” on a website, simply put, is the textual and visual information that conveys a message to your customer.  At its most basic, it is a description of the product or service.  At its best, it educates or solves the reader’s problem, helping to convert them into a lifetime customer. Content is rapidly becoming critical to helping your potential customers find you through a search engine.  It is critical that you build useful content on your company’s website.

While companies that sell to the consumer market are very good at creating content for their websites, traditional industrial B2B companies are, for the most part, failing miserably. Content for such a business tends to be more technical in nature, requiring more than general marketing knowledge to create.  As a result, many industrial companies ignore it altogether.  The underlying reason for a lack of content creation seems to be this:

Your marketing professionals don’t fully understand your technology and your technical people are not well versed in marketing.

Is it hard for you to explain what your company does, to someone who is not in the business? That’s not unusual in the Industrial Business-to-Business world because these products often require specific technical knowledge to be understood.  As a result, many companies operate under the assumption that their business is too technical to take advantage of online marketing techniques. However, many businesses that formerly ranked at the top of the search results are now disappearing from the first page, due to a lack of CONTENT on their website.  Doing nothing is a path to obscurity, as younger generations rely almost entirely on search engines to discover new companies.

If you suspect your organization suffers from a lack of content, we can help.  Six Foot Lever LLC specializes in teaching your team to create beneficial Technical Content.  Our people have the technical experience and education to understand your technology, along with the marketing knowledge to get your message out.  However, there is a lot you can learn just by reading the rest of this article.  By the way, this article is essentially content marketing for our own company (whoa, meta!).

A more detailed explanation of what is meant by “content” is in order, along with why it’s important.  Have you ever read a “blog” or an online review?  When the author is genuine in their intent (not just trying to rank for keywords) they try to help the reader solve a problem or teach them something useful.  Search engines (especially Google) recognize this and try to take into account the “content” on a web page or site when displaying results.  This is why you often see consumer reviews, lists, or how-to articles in the results.  Someone has taken the time to write valuable (we hope) content for their reader and the search engine attempts to provide that information to their user.  At the same time, this content helps the search engine to figure out what your website is about.

For example, if you (as a Google user) search “how to apply sunscreen”, Google will attempt to find results that will be useful to YOU (try it!).  Those results appear right under any ads (hint, “how-to” searches tend to show fewer ads for some reason).  Because this is a consumer product that everyone uses, competition would be stiff to get your content on page one of the search results.  There will likely be a LOT of content out there for any consumer product searches as people try to lead you to their review or e-commerce website.

Now let’s search for a more technical subject, like “how to measure roundness” (roundness being one of the technical terms in metrology).  There are a LOT of companies out there that make metrology equipment to measure this feature.  But look at the results and how many metrology companies do you see?  On the day I did this (7/12/17), exactly one metrology company showed up on the first page, Taylor Hobson (link to article).  Every other result was a definition of roundness or a methodology.  This gives a sizable publicity edge to Taylor Hobson, as they were the only company SELLING A PRODUCT to show up in the results.  So how did Taylor Hobson do this?  By writing TECHNICAL CONTENT that was USEFUL TO THE READER. Whether it was a conscious effort or not, I do not know.  But, in their efforts to provide useful content on their website, they ranked for the search term “how to measure roundness”.  That may not be the exact term that YOU would use to find a roundness gage, but it can be assumed that many people looking for a way to measure roundness, may need a roundness gage.

All of this will come as no surprise to a content marketer, but many industrial companies are missing the boat because they aren’t even aware that content matters. Anyone familiar with SEO (search engine optimization) would also point out that context matters, but this subject falls outside the scope of this article.

Google, in particular, has become more content-driven over time. This means that Google is ranking sites based on how useful they are to their own users.  Prior to Google addressing this in their algorithm, search results might have shown the site with more backlinks or the website with the most relevant keywords.  Of course, no one outside of Google knows the WHOLE story of what they are ranking sites for.  The point here is that GOOD CONTENT, in context, improves your chances of being found by your potential customer.  So, if you sell a technical product or service and don’t have good technical content, you may not even show up in the results.  Worse, much of the effort your marketing team did in the past may now be irrelevant.

You can hire marketing people or contractors, but unless they have the capability to understand your field, the best they can do is run ads based on keywords that you provided.  It is wise to supplement this by creating USEFUL content around the same keywords.  Unfortunately, your marketing people may not be able to create this content on their own.  Having your engineer create content can also present a problem as they may fail at capturing the reader’s interest, or at conveying the marketing message.

The Six Foot Lever team can assess your current capabilities and can usually train the people you already have to become more effective.  For smaller companies that do not have a dedicated marketing team, we can handle all of your content creation needs, for a very reasonable cost.  Sometimes a single presentation to key people is all that is needed to kick off your content creation efforts.  Email us to learn more, or use the contact form below: info@sixfootlever.com

Darren Dawes
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Note: This article is meant as an introduction for business owners who may not be aware of the importance of content creation.  It is not intended to be a definitive guide to content writing.  Many details were left out in the interest of brevity.

 

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Learn about the Threat from Leveraged Technology

Posted on by Darren Dawes

Leveraged Technology refers to the digital tools that are available to every business, regardless of size.  These tools can be used to displace much larger companies or to reinforce your own company’s position in the marketplace.

 

This article is meant to be an introduction to the concept of Leveraged Technolgy*

 

The Existential Threat to Your Business, from Leveraged Technology and the Solo Entrepreneur

We are entering an economic shift where the solo entrepreneur or micro business will be able to compete with mid to large-sized organizations, by using a combination of outsourcing and digital technology tools.

A new generation is busily learning these tools, which will turn their tiny new businesses into an asymmetric threat in your market niche. Mastery of these tools will make it impossible for you to compete with them in the future unless you take steps to prepare your organization. Disruption is the operative word and tactic of the upcoming entrepreneur and while disrupting an existing business model can be great news for the consumer, it presents a serious threat to those whose livelihood is being disrupted.

Your new competitors will need only to understand your market niche to assemble the virtual team needed to compete with your established business. As newer generations learn how to exploit these tools, EVERY established business is at risk. It is simply a matter of time before someone from this generation decides that your niche is worth pursuing.

If you’ve been paying attention to Small Business for the last ten years, you are no doubt aware of what solo entrepreneurs and start-ups with minimal funding have been able to achieve. Although their core product or service holds some interest to us, it is not what is threatening your business.

Instead, consider the capabilities they exhibit outside their core product. They are somehow able to design, build, and market a product, then manage their finances with a small team or even a single person. They have seemingly mastered the support tasks that every business must contend with, without employing (sometimes literally) a support team.

Now, ponder for a moment that their methods of conducting business grew not out of design and intent, but rather from necessity. With a shortage of both personnel and funding, they leveraged outsourcing and technology tools to perform classic business functions at little to no cost. In some cases, they even developed the technologies that were necessary to fill these roles. By attaining efficiencies that were inconceivable ten years ago, they have been able to compete with established businesses. Quite possibly, they could not have existed in the first place if not for these tools. Today’s solo entrepreneur has many online and outsourced tools available that would have required teams of people to emulate, as little as ten years ago. For the first time ever, it is now possible for a single person to access outsourcing and technology tools to:

  • Design a Product
  • Keep the Books
  • Find an Overseas Manufacturer
  • Ship to a Fulfillment Center
  • Market to Their Customer

The new solo entrepreneur (or solopreneur) is able to accomplish all of these tasks and more through the use of a number of online resources. They are also able to create recurring revenue streams around an existing product without a single person to support it after the initial launch. Some of these online resources are:

……and the list goes on and on. When we add 3D scanning and printing, along with an easily accessible manufacturing base in China, the force-multiplying effects are stunning. All of this can be done from a single computer, without a warehouse or building full of highly paid overhead (a.k.a. employees), or even an office. It’s not difficult (but there is a learning curve), nor is it expensive. But running an online business is also not the subject of this article.

All these new techniques and services are used to support the solo entrepreneur’s core product, which more often than not, is something that did not previously exist in the marketplace. This presents a limited threat to existing businesses. But consider what would happen if the same techniques were used against your established business.

Imagine if one of these young geniuses of the tech industry were to use these techniques and target YOUR established business. Whether you sell a product or a service, would you know how to compete with the solo entrepreneur or small group who could match or surpass your existing resources?

There is already a trend of solopreneurs who provide marketing services, turning on their previous clients and manufacturing the very items they were helping to market. The last case I heard was of an Internet marketer that decided to offer his own line of lotions and scrubs because he figured that if the client had enough margin to hire him, it was a good business. Without having to pay someone to market his own products, the margins were even bigger. The design and manufacture of the product were the easy parts!

Online tools are becoming increasingly sophisticated, yet easier to learn every day. Not every solopreneur will create the next Twitter. Most are going to start their business in existing industries and aim to disrupt them with agility, service, and creativity. These people may not have the imagination to create an original business, but they will understand the tools needed to crush yours. Imagine someone selling your core product or service, but without the expenses of payroll, marketing, or fulfillment. Imagine a single person managing multiple teams of designers, all working to create a product designed to beat you at your own game. These thoughts should keep the small business owner awake, but instead, most are still sleeping. Every established business, unless its core products are protected by a heavy patent portfolio, faces this threat. It is only a matter of time before these technology “guns” are trained on YOUR product or service. It may be hard to imagine that some group of young entrepreneurs would want to enter your business, let alone compete in it. However, you probably already have some competitors in your industry. What if THEY decide to adopt these leveraging technologies before you do……They only need to “get it” to start down the road of using these force multipliers to compete. As they scale up to crush you, you are now in the unenviable position of playing catch-up.

The story of the start-up is often written around the product or the mission that directs them. Instead, maybe we should be asking these start-ups, what “tools” they used to gain the efficiencies that make them successful. Tim Ferriss talked about employing some of these tools in his landmark book, The Four Hour Workweek. In it, he proposes how one person can set up an income stream and then travel the world on the automated income. Great, but I think a lot of people miss one of the major conclusions that can be drawn from his work.

The Four Hour Workweek is, at its core, a book about leveraging technology to gain efficiency. Sure, the lone entrepreneur can use these technology tools to start an automated business and travel the world, but I almost wish he had left the secondary title off of the cover. The tools that Tim talks about can be used by any size company, to improve efficiency and become more competitive. Putting “Escape 9–5, live anywhere, and join the new rich” on the cover, makes it harder to get a CEO to read it. Maybe Tim will repackage it someday as “How to Leverage Technology and Employ Pareto’s Rule, to Quadruple your Competitive Advantage.” That would make it easier to sell the idea to upper management!

You might be thinking, “Why can’t we do this right now and make our company unassailable in our niche? Why can’t we teach some of our own employees, to use the solo entrepreneur’s tools as force multipliers? Why can’t we harden our organization to the threat, before it materializes”?

The first step in preparation might be to allocate the responsibilities of or create the position of (in the case of a larger organization), a Chief Technology Officer. To use recognized corporate titles, the CTO is responsible for the dissemination of technology through the corporation and products. It is their responsibility to stay current on the leveraging technologies, but more importantly, to train employees in their uses. Ideally, this would be someone that you already have, who understands the technologies and how they can be used in your business, to improve employee and corporate effectiveness. This person could even be the hobby-entrepreneur that is already lurking in your organization. This “intrapreneur” can be used to excite the other employees to adopt and learn new tools. In lieu of an actual CTO, there are also companies like SixFootLever.com, which specialize in training your existing workforce to respond to asymmetric threats from these technologies.

Is it possible to change the culture of an established organization, so that they can compete with the modern startup and their technological tools? Certainly, it is possible, but the older the company is, the more set they tend to be in their ways. A lot depends on how effective this intrapreneur/CTO is in “selling” the rest of the company on the idea that the threat is real and imminent.

They must also be able to explain the technologies and provide a frame of reference, to those who may not have a technical background. Then, they must be able to persuade management and employees to act, in order to save their company and their jobs.

*This article is a general overview of WHY you need to train your employees to adapt to Leveraged Technology, regardless of the type of business you run.  It is a brief intro to some of the tools and methods and is written for a traditional brick and mortar business, that may have limited capabilities.  It is NOT written for the experienced Digital marketer, so there is no need to tell me all the things I “missed” 😉

This article was originally posted by Darren Dawes, on Medium.com  It is part one in a series that continues on LinkedIn

Darren Dawes
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Industrial B2B Video Marketing

Posted on by Darren Dawes

Merry Christmas!  While you are enjoying the holiday break, we’ll be hard at work bumping your business down the first page of Google’s search results.  Well, maybe not your business specifically, but more than a few B2B companies will return from the holidays to discover that they no longer hold a top position.  How we do this may surprise you because it doesn’t involve paid advertising.

First, a frame of reference:  Over the last ten years, Google has placed increasing emphasis on “content”.  This is not new.  Content, in this context, is the written word on your website which is useful to the reader–in this case a prospective customer.  This is well understood in the B2C world and among the larger players in the B2B world.  However, most small to mid-size businesses are doing a terrible job on their written content.  They are so far behind that they may never reach the first page of Google search results.  But there is hope, because…

Another form of content is video–and here is where things get interesting.  Even small B2B companies can reach the top of page one with video.  We know, because we’ve been doing it for the last year, displacing larger and better-funded players.  What may be surprising is that we’ve been doing it not only with YouTube, but with other video services like Vimeo.  It seems that for now, Google is giving preference to video not only from their own YouTube service, but from other platforms as well.

If you are a B2B company selling your wares to industrial customers, you probably already have plenty of video content that can be used to help new customers find you, but you need to know what to do with it.

At Six Foot Lever, we’re standing by to assist you.  But if you’ve already burned through your marketing budget for the year, here is a holiday gift for you:

Our 2019 Video SEO Checklist will get you started in maximizing your existing video content.  If you take a little time to follow the steps, you’ll be well on your way to the first page of search engine results, using the video you already paid for.

What could be a better gift for your business than free advertising?

 

 

Six Foot Lever is a Detroit-based marketing firm specializing in industrial B2B customers.

 

 

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2019 Video SEO Checklist

Posted on by Darren Dawes

Maximize the videos you already have so they appear at the top of Google search results, with our 2019 B2B video SEO checklist.

Google is showing a preference for video content in the search results and you can make this work in your B2B marketing. It’s no surprise that Google wants to bring people to YouTube, but what is surprising is that they are showing a preference for video…even if it’s on a different platform.

If you aren’t ready to pay a pro to do this for you, don’t worry.  You can go a long way by following the checklist below.  The checklist does not tell you every small detail, but with a little searching, you CAN do this yourself.  Our YouTube checklist is also helpful if you aren’t looking for a Detroit-based marketing and advertising agency but still want to use the know-how of the Six Foot Lever team.

Beginner’s Video Content Checklist:

  • Create a video in HD (a minimum of 720, but 1080 or 4K is better). This video should have narration because YouTube (Google) has the ability to identify spoken keywords in a video (first Pro Tip to maximizing your video’s impact).  Obviously, everyone wants their video to have perfect editing and branding,  but don’t let the perfect be the enemy of progress.  A product video shot with your iPhone is better than nothing.
  • Upload the video to your YouTube channel. Don’t neglect to fill in your channel description.
  • Fill in the video description!  We’re surprised at how many people skip this step or put just one line of info because some “marketing expert” said the description doesn’t matter for SEO.  Although it’s unlikely you will be able to measure an impact in search engine results, YouTube still needs to know what your video is about so it can be associated with other videos.  This is key to someone discovering your company after watching your competitor’s video.  Explain what your product is doing in the video and be sure to use keywords from your industry (words and phrases your CUSTOMER would use to find you).
  • Put a link in the description back to a relevant page on your website. If this product can be purchased on an e-commerce site, make sure to link it as well.  Preferably, these pages have some of the information from the video description, which lets Google know the page is relevant.  Put your contact info as well, so a prospective customer can find you.
  • Fill in the keywords section with terms that YOUR CUSTOMER would use to find your product or service. If you engage in keyword research, remember that in the B2B Industrial world, key terms may not show significant usage.  This is where conventional marketing agencies often fail, using keywords that have more searches, but much lower relevance.
  • Embed the YouTube video on the page your video linked back to.
  • Now repeat these same steps on Vimeo.com (second Pro Tip). The format is different, but all of these steps can also be implemented on Vimeo.  For the time being it appears that Google is being “fair” to Vimeo by showing their videos alongside YouTube results.  This could change in the future, or maybe Google is doing this because they are going to buy Vimeo later.  Who knows.  What I can tell you is that we’ve ranked Vimeo videos above competing YouTube videos.  We’ve even ranked a Vimeo video right next to an identical YouTube video, pushing the other video competitors to the right, in the slider (off the page).
  • This last step is the hardest to do but can have a significant impact on the search performance of your video: create and upload a closed caption script.  Although YouTube will auto-generate captions, many technical terms will not translate correctly.  There are services that will do this for you, but we find that an easier way is to just correct the auto-generated text through your channel dashboard.

 

Bonus Pro Tip

If you’ve read this far, you should be rewarded, so we will outline a strategy that no one (if anyone) is using.  When you link to a YouTube video from your webpage, you may have noticed that other videos play at the end of the video.  Often times these are competitor’s videos.  We see this all the time when people use a YouTube link on LinkedIn (if your marketing team has done this….PLEASE let us show them how to handle video promotions on LinkedIn).  You need to use the embed code for the video, rather than a simple link and then change your end of video settings so they do not autoplay.  But there is another way.

Instead of putting your YouTube video front and center, put it at the very end of the page with a sentence above it that says, “Here’s the same video if you prefer to watch on YouTube”. *

Now go back and embed the Vimeo version of your video on the web page, where appropriate.  On the Vimeo platform, you can control what video plays next (set this in the video settings).  So your customer will see other video content from you after the first video, even if they follow the link to Vimeo.  Vimeo also allows you to embed an email sign up form, or buttons to bring them to your store, front page, contact info, etc.

Chances are, your customer will not watch the video on YouTube, because they’ve already watched it on the Vimeo link.  However, by putting it at the bottom, your page will still enjoy the benefit of being cross-linked to a Google platform.  You should also consider that many IT departments block YouTube from their employees (last Pro tip) but Vimeo is often left off the blacklist.

In summary, the Vimeo video is the content for your customer, but the YouTube video also brings in outside viewers and helps with SEO.

Hopefully, this tip list gets you started in the process of ranking your videos at the top of search results.  Remember, you don’t have to be in the Detroit area, or even in Michigan, to hire the Six Foot Lever digital marketing team.  Email us at info@sixfootlever.com to see if we are a good fit for each other.

*Make sure to turn off the YouTube suggested video feature (as shown in this post), which will force the player to suggest your other videos at the end.  However, this only works if the viewer does not follow the link to the YouTube site.

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Six Foot Lever Now Offers Technical Content Writing

Posted on by Darren Dawes

We now offer technical writing for engineering and metrology clients.

In the course of helping our clients, we’ve encountered a common theme; They just don’t have the time to contribute regularly to their blogs.  Many of the companies we assist are technically oriented, offering very niche manufacturing products or engineering services.  There is often a disconnect between the personnel that run the blog and those that understand the technical aspects of the product or service.  A Marketing department can only write so much…before it sounds like “marketing”.  Your customers want to read technical information, if you want them to stay engaged.  Since our staff consists of engineers from various disciplines, we’ve started to assist our customers in the writing of technical content.  This entails an interview process with the client’s engineering and web resources.  From this, a topic list is produced and then we set to work researching each article and writing useful content that your customers will actually read.  Each article is reviewed by the client before publishing.

It’s not difficult to find someone to write content if you are selling sunglasses.  However, if you are offering niche products in manufacturing or engineering services, you need writers with that background.  For a sample of our writing content, please see this public article on camshaft gauges, published by one of our technical content contributors.

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Is Your Website Content Being Copied?

Posted on by Darren Dawes

Here are a couple of handy tools we use at Six Foot Lever, to analyze client websites and content. Both happen to be from Indigo Stream Technologies and have useful functionality, even if you don’t spring for the paid versions. They are fun to play with and can show you what you need to do next.

The first tool is called Siteliner. Siteliner will scan your website and look for broken links, duplicate content, and provide a nice summary report with other useful metrics.

 

Find your broken links

Find your broken links

There are other tools out there that perform similar functions, but the Siteliner tool is handy for the non-technical website owner to find broken links and to see how their site compares with other sites that have been scanned by Siteliner.

The second tool is called Copyscape and can help you to verify that you have original content on your site. Suppose that you are paying someone to create original content for your blog, etc. How do you know that it is truly original? Copyscape will find similar content from other locations, so you can verify it for yourself.

 

Conversely, Copyscape can scour the interwebs and tell you if someone is stealing your content.

Both tools offer significant value for the business owner who is not necessarily a web designer or content producer, but who wants to see if they are getting value from the people that do provide them with these services.

This article originally appeared on Darren Dawes’ LinkedIn page

 

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Protect Your Online Reputation, for Free!

Posted on by Darren Dawes

Protecting the online reputation of your Detroit Small Business does not need to be difficult or expensive.

Here is one way to get started for no cost.

Do you know what your customers and competitors are saying about you online?

As business owners, we are concerned when a customer or client has a bad experience with our brand. If the customer lets us know, we do our best to correct it and turn them into a loyal supporter. But often, the customer goes away disappointed or worse, they write about their bad experience online. Bad press can be extremely difficult to deal with if you know about it. It’s even harder to deal with if you don’t know about it. So, knowing what people are saying and where is the fist step to protecting your reputation. Fortunately, getting started is easy with this one suggestion.

Mention.com is an online service that monitors online media for any mentions of your product or business. A starter account is free and will let you set up a few basic searches and see what people are saying. Of course, there are a number of online reputation management companies and that may be a more practical solution, as your business grows. But here at SixFootLever.com we are about teaching small to mid-sized businesses how they can get measurable improvements, using technology tools and their own employees.

You can also use Mention’s services to reply to online mentions, through your social accounts. After you’ve got the basics down, try putting in your competitor’s information and see what others are saying about them. If you see a question about their product that is going unanswered, jump in and try to answer. It’s a great way to show off your superior customer service! Be polite and never speak ill of your competitors, just do a better job of answering their customer’s questions.

So give Mention.com a try and see if you don’t learn something about how your customers perceive your product or business. We have no affiliation with Mention.com, we just think that they have a great service that can be learned in about 10 min. It’s one of the first tools we show our clients, at SixFootLever!

Note: you may discover that some of your “mentions” are random clips of text, from your own web page. You can ignore those, as they are likely due to first generation internet marketers “spinning articles” or creating link farms. If the postings mention you but do not appear to make any sense, don’t worry about it. At least for now. Maybe we’ll talk about that in an upcoming post.

 

Check out our LinkedIn post about using Mention.com to protect your online reputation.  You can learn it in 10 min and it’s FREE to get started!

This article originally appeared on Darren Dawes’ LinkedIn page:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/1-thing-you-can-do-right-now-protect-your-online-reputation-dawes

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3 Easy Ways to Leverage Technology Tools, to Bulletproof Your Business

Posted on by Darren Dawes

Learning how Internet Technology Tools can help your Detroit Business is easy.

 Here are 3 to get started:

Some of my friends with small businesses have asked what I’ve been working on with SixFootLever consulting. SixFootLever is a training company that seeks to teach established, mid-sized businesses, new technology tools and services that are available to improve efficiency and protect their market niche. Some examples include small scale outsourcing, manufacturing abroad, automatic order fulfillment, online visibility, customer engagement methods, and recurring revenue systems. These technology tools and services have now advanced to the point where it is easy to teach your employees the needed skills by integrating them with their current responsibilities. In many cases, you will no longer need to hire out these services, because SixFootLever teaches the man (or woman) to fish. You still CAN hire out when required, but now you will do it abroad, in order to reduce the costs. You can easily contract out the tasks you need accomplished, rather than hiring a permanent employee or consultant.

So for my friends and followers, here is an example of what we teach. This article describes, in general, 3 steps a traditional small business can take to exploit the solo entrepreneur’s technology leveraging tools and improve efficiency. The idea is to use the same tricks that today’s new solo entrepreneur uses, so that you can streamline your own business. When used by a small to medium sized business, these tricks act as force multipliers (hence the use of “lever” in our name) to improve efficiency, reduce the cash outlay for services, and reduce the number of employee hours needed to complete tasks:

Today’s solo entrepreneurs (aka solopreneurs) and start-ups use a number of technology tools and services to help them start and run a business, with a minimum of resources. Some of these tools previously existed in a more complicated form and others were recently developed, to meet the solopreneur’s limited time resources. They allow the solopreneur to accomplish feats that would have required teams of people to emulate, as little as ten years ago. In most cases, the tools are scalable, as the business grows. For the first time ever, if is now possible for a single person using technology tools to:

  • Raise Capital
  • Design a Product
  • Manufacture at Home or Abroad
  • Market to the Customer
  • Ship from a Fulfilment Center
  • Keep the Books
  • Create Recurring Revenue Models
  • and more

The tools available allow a single person or small team to start a new business, or more importantly for this discussion, to be able to compete with a larger business.

Note that even using these tools, it would be very difficult for the individual to compete with a large company like HP or Intel where there are teams of people assigned to each of the above tasks. Additionally, many of these companies are aware of the tools of the solopreneur and are working to bring them into their business model. The smarter large companies and the solopreneur have a handle on this shift in the way business is being done. But what about the established mid-sized companies? For this discussion, we’ll call them the small businesses with 25 to 300 employees. The ones that do a good job of running their operations, using conventional “departments”, job descriptions, and structures. These companies face a growing threat (see my darker article, “the Threat” on Medium.com) from the start up that decides to target their business and will have an even harder time than usual, competing against larger companies. They have not learned the technology tools of the solopreneur and lack the advantages that a larger business achieves from scale. For these companies, the past approach has been to hire out the specialized knowledge required to leverage these tech tools. But can you really trust your core business to hired guns?

There is already a trend of solopreneurs who provide marketing services, turning on their previous clients and manufacturing the very items they were helping to market. The last case I heard was of an Internet marketer that decided to offer his own line of lotions and scrubs because he figured that if the client had enough margin to hire him, it was a good business. Without having to pay someone to market his own products, the margins were even bigger. The design and manufacture of the product was the easy part!

It is no longer necessary to hire out these services and trust that “expert” in, for one example, web design. It may have been necessary 15 years ago when all websites were .html and you needed a coder to set up a system that fit YOUR business. However, the tools have continuously improved, in no small part because of the number of software engineers (coders) in business for themselves. They have found the needs and filled them, putting the tools within the understanding of the average person.

So what can the small to mid-sized, established business do to compete? Teach your people to fish! Since these tools are accessible to the average person, you no longer need to hire these tasks out. Put your own people back in charge of the functions you’ve outsourced and teach them new skills! In the near future, these will be basic skills required of every employee. By teaching your people now, you are not only protecting your own business, but offering value to your employees. They will get to learn marketable skills which will reinvigorate their interest in their current job.

There are a myriad of new tools available, but we’ll just pick three examples where you can pick up significant gains, with the least effort. All of the following can be set up and run by a single person, but in your case, you may choose to distribute them among your current employees. For this discussion, we’ll limit the discussion to the following topics:

  1. Marketing
  2. Order Fulfillment
  3. Training and Recurring Revenue models

There are of course many more, but we can get the point across with these three, for the sake of brevity. After all, this is just an introduction and there are hundreds of tools available.

  1. One area where the solopreneur must absolutely succeed, without exception, is in Marketing. The challenge for a lone voice to get heard in a world of billions is substantial. For the last few years, assuming the business was savvy enough to have a webpage, the model has been to pay for “clicks” with the concept being that anyone that searches your business keywords will find your webpage. This method still works, but can cost a significant amount of money (especially if you make no effort to measure conversions and determine the cost of each customer) and ignores the free organic traffic that you can generate from writing content. Every business should have a web page to guide your customer to the next step in the buying process and to inform them about the product or service. We’ll assume that you’ve gone at least that far. So, how do we get customers to our web page without pay per click campaigns? There are 50 or more approaches, but let’s look at the one you can already do, Content Creation. Content Creation means writing or providing…..wait for it….content. This can be in the form of a short, written blog post on your website, a dedicated page on your site that teaches the consumer about your industry, or a how-to video. Although it may mention your product, this is not an advertisement. Rather, it is something that your customer can make use of to benefit THEM. This serves two purposes. First, it gives useful information to your potential customers and establishes YOU as the industry expert. Second, by targeting specific phrases in your writing, search engines will find you when someone searches your phrase. That’s an over simplification, but this is an introductory article. No one knows more about your business than you. So, start writing. Get your employees to write. Filter their thoughts as little as possible, then send it off to a proofreader (free tip, find one starting at $5 on Fiverr.com). Content is a way to engage your customer in open conversation and provide information for everyone to share. Allow questions and answers. You can approve, or “moderate” what ends up on your site. The goal here is to talk about your business and share insights. You want to share valuable information that will directly benefit your customer….for free. Yep, that’s right, FREE! Give so much to your potential customers that they will feel obligated to buy from you when the time comes. (For an in-depth look at this, read Gary Vaynerchuk’s “the Thank You Economy” or his other works). Even if someone else is in a similar business, no one is YOU. You and your people have unique insights and experiences that can benefit your customers. If you haven’t already, have your webpage set up in WordPress, to make it easier for your own people to maintain it and add content. When writing content, you will use key words (“keywords”) that point to the goal or subject of the content. Used in a proper, natural way, these focus words will tell the search engines what the post or page is about.
  2. Order fulfillment and shipping. Does your business have a hard product, do they sell spares, or do they ship software? How do you fill orders? If you are a traditional mid-sized company, you have a means of receiving a PO or payment information, processing the payment, and then a packing and shipping department to send it out. (If your business is primarily a “teaching” company (training, etc.) see number 3, below.) The process usually involves checking inventory and ship times and a certain amount of internal communication. Instead, why not let your customer check the inventory and place his order accordingly. This process can be automated by using an online store service (see Shopify) or fulfillment center, like Amazon. The cost borders on insignificant, with plans starting at $10 a month. For far less than you pay to have an employee do this, they will check inventory, process payment, warehouse, and ship your product. Do you sell something where this is impractical, for example, large machinery? I’ll bet you can automate at least PART of the business (like spare parts and consumables). Even if you cannot process EVERY order through an automated system, even automating part of the process will free up your people to do a better job elsewhere. Did you know that Amazon has an industrial supply site? If not, what else are you missing?
  3. Training. Does your product require in-person training, or does it have an owner’s/user manual? That probably meets the basic need, but maybe you and your people know little “tricks” about the product, that you can show your customer. Why not shoot a video and post it on YouTube or another service? This fills a number of needs. It can help a search engine find you (don’t forget to link to your site), make your product more desirable, provide a resource for you customer, train new employees, and/or be scaled into a recurring revenue model. Depending on your product or business, there may be demand for more “advanced” training than the manual can provide. How about creating step-by-step training videos. For the solopreneur, this is often the ONLY means they have of training since they are a one person operation. Other businesses are built around training videos for another company’s products because, the great thing about a video is that once you create it, it can be sold over and over again. You are selling the SAME product to multiple customers. Why not do a set of short training videos and see if there is an interest. What’s the cost? Well, here we leverage a couple of technologies. First, we’ll use a product like Camtasia to edit a video shot with an iPhone, or to capture your computer screen (if your product involves software). Cost, about $350 and a couple hours of time. This type of software has reached a point where it is intuitive to use. You can get a video that is 80% of what a professional studio can produce, using your own people, for a fraction of their price… Plus, as you might have guessed, they have video training available, if you get stuck. Next, go to Fiverr and have a voiceover added, based on the subtitles that you put into the video. Cost, $5-$15. Post it on your site and on YouTube. If response is favorable, consider adding more videos and selling them to your customers for a small fee or subscription charge.

So there are three easy action items for you that can help your company begin to leverage technology. There is enough information here for you to take action, or, you can check out SixFootLever.com to see the one-time fees to train your employees. Either way, it will go a lot smoother if you can start to locate your own entrepreneurs in the company (aka intrapreneurs), to champion and set up each one of these tools. It has always been the case that in a mid-sized company, that there are those who “moonlight” in another job.  Today, moonlighting often means pursuing a hobby or interest and turning it into an online business. Since these people are the solopreneurs we’ve been discussing (albeit with varying levels of success), it makes sense to search them out, from within your own organization. There are easy ways to find them, but that is the topic of another article.

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn as:

3 Easy Ways to Leverage Technology Tools, to Bulletproof your Established Business

This article explains how to use three easy tools to protect your Detroit based business!

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Training for Your Employees

Posted on by Darren Dawes

Six Foot Lever teaches the employees you already have, how to use the modern tools of business as a force multiplier for your workforce, no matter how large or small.

Most established businesses are so busy with day-to-day operations, they do not have time to take advantage of the new online tools that can boost your efficiency, overnight. Our goal is to identify and train your own employees to provide these functions, rather than pay endless consulting or maintenance fees. Some of the skills we teach are:

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques
  • Online Outsourcing  (design, accounting, I.T., etc.)
  • LinkedIn for business
  • Content Creation
  • Automatic Warehousing and Order Fulfillment
  • Online Advertising (but you probably won’t need it!)
  • Long Form Email Marketing
  • Website Construction and Maintenance
  • Technical Content Creation
  • Mail List Development for Promotions
  • Social Media
  • Video Editing and Training Program Development
  • Recurring Revenue Models

By teaching these tools and techniques to your employees, you will attract more customers, enhance revenue, and reduce operational expenses.  Find out how much it costs to give your people these tools, by clicking on “Give Me An Example” at the top of the page.  Don’t pay for a service when you can learn a skill!

We can also assist you in generating technical content for your company’s news feed or blog.  Our engineers can interpret your products or services and help you generate interesting articles on a more frequent basis than you can do on your own.

Email us at info@sixfootlever.com to learn more!

Six Foot Lever LLC, Detroit, MI

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