Most of you tech savvy business people out there have had a LinkedIn account for years, but have you been truly using it to increase your business opportunities? If you want to reap the benefits of a LinkedIn account, you need to commit to actively using it on a consistent basis. At the very least you should look at your profile every day to see to see who your contacts are networking with, and if there are more “People You May Know” listed in your profile. Remember, your contacts’ new contacts are now in your network, and the groups they have joined may be of interest to you.

If you’re interested in learning about some good LinkedIn practices that help you make the most of your profile and find great contacts quickly, download part one and two of our three part series.

As a business owner, it’s sometimes difficult to think about upgrading things that seem to be “working”, especially in tough economic times.  The question is, “are they really working as hard as they can be for your business?”.  A great example of this is your company’s website.  While it was OK 5 years ago to have someone take your brochure and turn it into a website so you could put it on your business cards, that’s just not the way the web is working today for businesses who are taking full advantage of it.

Today, the first thing most people do when they are looking for a product or service, even if it was referred to them, is Google it.  The first few seconds form a large part of the impression the visitor will have of the target business forever (remember what your mom always said about first impressions).  Below are a few key things that people react to  - whether they know it or not.  You should keep them in mind as you look at your own web site, even if you think it doesn’t matter for your business (because it does).

1. Is the design attractive and does it look “current”?  A design that was nice 5 years ago does not always stand the test of time.  Compare how your site looks to others in your industry, or even other sites you feel project the type of image you want for your company.  You might be surprised.
2. Is your date specific content up to date?  If the last newsletter or news item you posted was in 2006, you should probably pull that section of the web site out.  Its hurting you more than helping you.
3. Is your site cross browser compatible?  While the world used to only view the web through the eyes of Internet Explorer, other browsers such as Firefox and Chrome have come a long way in gaining market share.  Make sure your web site looks the same (or at least presentable) in all of the major browsers available today.

These are just a few items that can make a good first impression.  But once people decide they are “OK” with you, you need to keep talking.  There has to be enough valuable information on your website to make the visitor (prospect) contact you instead of the next person on the search list.  Keep it interesting.  Add content regularly and give people reasons to come back.  If they browsed by but weren’t ready to buy the first time, impress them with fresh content and ideas the next time they “stop by”.  People want to get to know you by visiting your web site and be comfortable that you can take care of them.  You have to work to keep that conversation going, especially when you sometimes don’t even know that the conversation is happening (we’ll talk about how to know exactly when someone is on your web site in a future post).  One of ForeSite’s web site experts wrote a paper on “10 Tips for Developing an Effective Website“.  Check it out if you are interested in how to upgrade your web presence.

In general, think of your web site as your ultimate marketing tool which if used properly will bring leads (and ultimately new business) to you so you don’t have to go searching for it yourself.  View your site through the eyes of your prospects.  And if you are having difficulty doing that, ask some of your current customers to do it for you.  Make sure that the conversation prospects are having with your web site is the same one they would have with you if you were in front of them.

Download 10 Tips for Developing an Effective Website

With all of the buzz about Microsoft’s latest plight in the search game, Bing, I decided I should do a little research.  Naturally where did I start?  Google.  As Google has become virtually synonymous with web search, Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle even with the troops that they have, but hopefully this will help those who are trying to make a decision a little bit.

To begin, Microsoft is claiming that Bing is supposed to help users make intelligent decisions, not simply push back results so that seemed like a good starting point for comparison.  I decided to do some parallel searches with Google and Bing to see where it got me.  My first search was “Where should I eat dinner tonight?”.  For both search engines, this was just too vague.  As a seasoned searcher, I added “in Hartford” to the search to see if that helped.  While a few restaurant guides came back in each, none were very relevant or targeted for my purpose.  For example, there were ones for “restaurants close to the Hartford Court House”.  As helpful as that may be for your repeat offenders, I try to stay in the more mainstream areas in Hartford and out of trouble.

Then genius hit me.  As someone in the network support business, I searched for “Network Support Hartford CT” to see some relevant results in today’s business world.  The results in Bing were mixed.  While 3 of the top 4 results were network support companies (including ForeSite in position #2), only 5 of the 10 results on the first page were relevant.  In Google, 8 of the 10 were related to network support though 2 were for jobs in the network support field.  While I personally believe that we should be the first result in all engines we were #3 in Google.  When you remove duplicate sites in both search engines, and the paid results in Google, the results were very similar though and it would be tough to make a decision on this alone.

Bing did have one feature that I thought was helpful which was the Document Preview feature.  When hovering a result, it tries to grab relevant text from the site and display it in a pop-up window without having to go to the site.  This was helpful to see if the displayed result was relevant without having to go to all of the different web sites listed.  This is not ground breaking, but was helpful.  Bing’s last feature that was obvious was the recent search results on the left hand side of the search page.  I’m not sure how helpful this will be over time, but I could see a few applications for it if you are looking for something you found in the recent past but can’t remember what you searched for.

So, I think this is a “no decision” unfortunately for Microsoft as they will have to come out with some real bells and whistles to de-thrown Google in the search business.

When I first started my business, I was always looking for ideas from other people about how they…well…ran their business.  In 1997 when I started ForeSite, the Internet wasn’t quite what it is today and finding templates on things like business plans, cash flow models, legal documents, proposal templates etc. were few and far between.  In comes 2009  and there is so much stuff out there, you don’t know where to start.  Go ahead, type “business plan template” into Google and see what you get (444,000 results in case you don’t want to bother).  Now Google does a pretty good job of trying to get you quality results, but some are articles, others are blogs, others are people trying to get you to click through thinking you are getting a template but you really have to buy something.  It can get pretty tiresome.

Luckily, there are new services that help filter out the good from the better.  For example,  Docjax.com is a site that will only return links to actual documents.  If you decide you only want Word documents, you can filter for only those.  Now when you start clicking through, you know that you will get back a document that you could begin to modify to suit your needs.  If you are fairly specific, you might even find exactly what you want on the first page (try: “small business farm template” for example).  You still get 1059 results, but right at the top are some pretty relevant documents.  Have some fun and download to your heart’s content.  Most of the results you’ll get will be free!