Brown Couch Consulting

I watch more and more of my clients struggle with the content of their website. How do you describe yourself? How do you describe your business? What colors to use? What information to post and what to keep private? All of these questions swirl around and become the proverbial writer’s block or developer’s block, I suppose, when putting together a site.

My best advise is don’t focus on getting everything right. Creating a website is much like writing a resume for your business. You’ll have to revisit it at least once a year if your business is doing well and more often if it’s not. Start off with the basics. Most businesses have a set of marketing materials even if they are oral and disorganized. Start with those and update them every 3 months or every month if time allows. It’s important to have a plan on how your site will grow, so when you add more information, it doesn’t become disorganized and you don’t have to spend money on a redesign.   Having this basic goal – start off small and build from there – will help your business get a presence on the web, or reclaim the presence it might have lost.

We often recommend a photo gallery for our clients.  Not only do customers like to see many different pictures of a product (think Zappos with their 8 images of the same pair of  shoes), but they also like to see pictures of your organization, your staff (think day spas) or meeting you’ve organized (think a professional organization such as NEWBO).

I am very pleased to announce that IBEX, one of our busiest customers, has posted a photo gallery of their destination countries and past tours.  Check it out: http://www.bioexploration.org/photo-gallery.html.  The pictures are breathtaking and we are adding more albums every week, so check back often.  If that doesn’t wet your appetite enough, read through the tour descriptions and start saving for a trip of a lifetime.

I just attended a seminar on Email Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.  Ha!  I can see how you can fit email marketing into a 3 hour presentation (and Zak Barron did a good job on this) but it’s rather difficult to fit SEO into a 3 hour presentation.  Nick Stamoulis of Brick Marketing did the presenting for this part.  I really liked Nick – you can see that he is really passionate about his work and enjoys it (a rarety in these days).

Here is an interesting tit bit on email marketing that I didn’t know.  What do you think is the ROI on an email marketing campaing?  $10?  $25?  Guess again.  It’s $48, which means that for every $1 you spend, on the average, you can get about $48.   That is of course on the average, and would only work with a well executed email campaign and would vary by industry.

So, what did Nick teach us about search engine optimization? It turns out that a good website is just like a good piece of cheese – properly aged and well care for.  The longer your site has been posted and active – the better.   The more friends you have on the web (i.e. relevant links from trusted sources that lead from and to your site), the better.  The cleaner your site is to the eye of the Google behemoth, the better you’ll rank. 

It also turns out that Google (and search engines and machines in general) like logic, clarity and order.  It’s not just good programming practice to clearly name your files and folders, but it’s necessary for google.  It makes sense, right?  Even humans can’t always figure out that famonbch.jpg is really family-on-the-beach.jpg.

Brown Couch Consulting is pleased to announce two new clients – Village Green Renewal and Shannon Law Offices.

Village Green Renewal is a handyman shop in Brookline Village owned by Seth Barrett. Seth started the store in 2008 and has already been reviewed by the Brookline Tab and CNN. Brown Couch Consulting created a website for Village Green Renewal and is helping publicize the store in the local community.   Look for this in our portfolio pages where we will espouse on the brilliance the shop and the site.

Shannon Law Offices is a small law office, also in Brookline Village, owned and operated by Christopher Shannon.  Brown Couch Consulting has been hired by Mr. Shannon to create a web presence for the practice, starting with a website.

I wrote in the previous post about the challenges of defining what a consulting firm does for its customers.  Having solved that problem, I moved onto another.  How to represent myself?  Post a picture to the site or not?  Finally, I decided that since my business is very personal – and we pride ourselves on that connection with our customers, I should have a picture posted.  So, here is my first professional headshot.

One of the hardest things when starting a consulting business is explaining to other people what you do.  I suppose some entrepreneurs don’t go through this bump, but we did (and some would say, still are). 

I’ve been asked numerous times what I do at Brown Couch.  For a while I was answering that I help small business owners take care of their customers, but that sounds like I am a temp who comes to your store to help you gift wrap sales during peak times.  So, that didn’t quite work. 

In truth, I help small business owners organize their webspace and email marketing.  I say organize, rather than create, because most businesses already have something setup up.  Usually, it the site they started with 5 years ago, when they launched their business and by now, it’s been corroded by the tide of constant updates and piecemeal changes.

What’s my approach?  First and foremost, I try to understand the business goals behind the website.  For most small business owners, the site isn’t a store, it just a means of marketing themselves and showing themselves as a legitimate business.  Then I find a solution that is the most cost effective for that business.  Sometimes, it’s  complete redesign of the site, other times, I take the pieces and make them whole again. 

So, that’s what I do.  I pick up the separate pieces of your business website and make them consistent with your business image.  I also help your business setup an email marketing or newsletter services, to ensure that it’s also consistent with your business.

I finally decided to take a morning to attend a seminar on Social Networking organized by NEWBO and presented by Susan LaPlante-Dube from Precision Marketing Group. 

Here is what I’ve learned: being successful is in part about making connections and knowing the right people.  Perhaps the guy who sat next to you in high school algebra is now a VP at a firm you’ve been trying to recruit.  Facebook and LinkedIn may be able to help you reconnect with him and close that business. 

I am not writing this to give you a course on Social Networking – you’ll have to contact Susan for that.  I am writing this to bring the point home that small business owners get too wrapped up in their business needs and forget to seek out and attend seminars and workshops that can help them expand their knowledge base.   My recommendation would be 1 workshop or seminar per week.  If you feel that your business can’t afford that expense, consider having your own staff do a seminar (I would do it off-site to give everyone a break from the office).

All too often that question comes up in a perspective customer’s mind when you are trying to sell them your services. The best way we’ve learned to tackle this concern is by creating a Portfolio or Case Study page.  Talk to your customers about your skills and have a few past projects in mind that really show off your services.   Then direct them to your portfolio or case study page so that they can see if for themselves.

Brown Couch Consulting has created ours: BCC Portfolio and we would love to hear what you think about it. Let us know through this blog or by email.

Well, that’s right folks.  We’ve added some images to our website.  Why?, you might ask. Well, honestly, the site felt bare and our consultant has been strongly recommending some visual help to our otherwise, dry and wordy site.  So, we splurged on some stock photography and we’re in business.  Check out the site and let us know what you think of all the pictures. 

Back on the soap box of hiring people with the right expertise to solve your pressing needs, I will need to get a professional photographer to do my headshot.  A real headshot. So, stay tuned.

I noticed a brilliant piece of co-promotion in one of my holiday gifts. I received a calendar with daily tips for women on housekeeping. Inside, very nonchalantly, there was a business card for a woman who is a certified Feng Shui consultant. I can’t imagine that there are many avenues for Feng Shui consultants to market their services, so I can see how this combo is a great for the consultant: she has targeted her demographic, women who are interested in keeping house.