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How the Traveling Entrepreneur Can Stay Organized When Out of Town

Many people are perfectly organized when they’re in their office. Emails get answered in an orderly fashion, and work gets done throughout the day. Yet, many entrepreneurs are often not in their home or virtual offices. Instead, they’re on the road trying to drum up business throughout the country.

Just trying to plan for the trip can lead to chaos, and then it’s even more difficult to get work done while out of town. Here are some tips to help traveling entrepreneurs plan and work during the trip.

Planning Your Week
When going to a conference or meeting, entrepreneurs may already have a booked scheduled. An itinerary will help keep track of session times, but these can also be used for actually scheduling some work time. Most smartphones have a calendar or reminder app. Before the flight is ever boarded, add the meeting sessions to the calendar, but then “schedule” free time for catching up on emails and getting work done. If it’s in the calendar, people are more likely to stick to their original plan.

If traveling out of the country, entrepreneurs should learn the local methods for travel, and if necessary, the bus and train schedules. Also, have some local currency on hand in case cash is required, and have smaller bills if you decide to split meals or cab rides with someone. Alert banks when traveling to avoid your bank cutting off your card due to suspicious spending activity.

While many people tend to wait to pack until the night before their trip, an entrepreneur on a business trip needs to verify that he has everything to make the trip successful. This should include laptop, business cards, contacts list, reports, presentations, business suits, USB drives, sunglasses, first-aid kit, etc., along with all personal items. For meetings, business suits or nice dresses will be required. Also, if attending a conference, trade show or meeting, check to see if there are special events that will require some extreme dress-up or casual clothing. Even if traveling to a warm client, bring a jacket or sweater and some long pants just in case it gets cold.

Create a list of everything that is needed for the trip ahead of time, and then begin packing a couple of days in advance. As items are packed, check them off the list. Verify that the luggage isn’t too heavy to avoid additional luggage fees.

How to Stay Organized While Gone
Besides keeping up with work and session schedules, down- and sleep time should also be scheduled. When traveling to a different time zone, try going to bed at an earlier or later time a week or two before – if possible. Then, add down/sleep time to the smartphone calendar, and stick with it. People get less done when they’re sleepy. Sleep is necessary to stay on track throughout the day.

During work time, shut off any external distractions. If necessary, head to the hotel room away from others, and turn the phone to silent unless it’s needed for work activities.

When traveling out of the country, make work calls using a system like Skype or Google Hangouts. These free or cheap alternatives will ensure that an entrepreneur is connected with the office without paying astronomical roaming or international phone fees.

If possible, delegate some work to others. Not everyone has an assistant or coworker, especially entrepreneurs. Utilize a Virtual Assistant while out of town to answer phone calls and take messages. This assistant can also answer general business questions and only forward important or emergency messages.

Get some work done on the plane. Certain airlines have WiFi, which can be used to catch up on emails and work while traveling to the destination. Store documents in a cloud drive like Google Docs or Dropbox. One advantage to a Google Docs type of system is that entrepreneurs will always have the latest iteration of a document even if someone else has made changes.

Finally, don’t be afraid to let things drop for a day or two, and then schedule a “make-up” day to catch up on emails and other work. Not everything can be done when traveling so instead schedule a day or two when travel is done to take care of everything else.

How do you stay organized when out of town? Do you have any additional rituals or tips for planning and keeping on track?

So, you’re ready to begin using social media for your small business. Here’s a simple guide to getting started.

There’s tons of information online about using social media to boost your small business. You can certainly get very in-depth with social media marketing, but if you’re just starting out, give these 5 simple steps a try.

The Best Tools and Methods for Improving Your Local SEO Presence

Small businesses often find it nearly impossible to rank on the first page of a Google search for competitive keywords. Most of the highly-searched terms are being used by their much larger competitors.

A smaller business, however, can rank high in local searches by using local SEO tactics. According to SE Talks, nearly “30% of the total searches in Google per month are localized searches”. This means that this 30% isn’t looking for the “top mechanics in the nation”. Instead, they want the “top mechanics in the New Orleans area”. A local business probably may not rank nationally, but it can take advantage of this large search pool that wants to find a business closer to home. Local SEO helps level the playing field, allowing local businesses to rank on the first page SERPs in their service areas.

Why Use Local SEO
Yet, small businesses need to rank near the top of the SERPs since sites on the first page of results get over 90% of total search traffic. Also, people want to research businesses before they buy anything, but they tend to buy within 10 to 20 miles of their current location.

Taking advantage of readily available localized search sites puts a business ahead of competitors that are not aggressively utilizing these channels. Also, when a business claims their local SEO listing, it will show up on Google maps, local business directories and even on mobile devices. The Google Hummingbird algorithm update more closely entwined mobile and local search to provide better, faster results to mobile device users. Taking advantage of mobile is very important since it accounts for nearly 30% of total web traffic, a huge audience of potential customers. Plus, over 80% of people who use their mobile devices to look for businesses “tend to make call or visit the location within 24 hours so the conversion rate of the local searches is very high”.

Going local can increase conversions and build brand awareness since businesses will show up in local searches more often. For a little amount of work, this increase in visibility will result in a high return on investment.

Methods for Building A Local Presence
Use this checklist to ensure that your business is fully take advantage of local search:

Part One of this two-part series

Standing desks have skyrocketed in popularity lately. Believers cite increased productivity, higher energy levels, less back pain, and other benefits as concrete proof that making the switch from sitting to standing is the best thing office workers can do for their health.

Before making the switch, it’s important that you understand the risks, too. You’ll likely have a long adjustment period before standing around all day feels normal and comfortable, and there are some health risks associated with being on your feet for eight or more hours each day.

Why does your small business website need Google Analytics?
Knowledge is power, and Google Analytics gives you all of the knowledge you need to understand your website’s success.

Analytics shows you where your visitors come from, how they got to your site, the actions that they took while on your site, and so much more. All of this information is useful for creating marketing campaigns, pay-per-click campaigns, accessing the success of social media campaigns, and testing SEO campaigns… to name only a few benefits. Essentially, Google Analytics helps small business owners get to know their audience and their potential customers.

Plus, it’s free. You can’t beat free.

How to get started with Google Analytics
Firing up Google Analytics isn’t as simple as just signing up for an account. The process is easy enough, but there are a few steps you’ll need to take before Google starts curating your metrics.

Signing up for an account is the first step, but you’ll also need to install a tracking code on your website. Google details the process thoroughly in its Getting Started Guide, so give that a read.

Important metrics to understand
Monitoring your website’s analytics won’t do much good if analyzing the metrics feels like reading Latin. You can create custom reports for nearly every metric imaginable, but here are a few numbers to pay attention to:
·Bounce Rate: The Bounce Rate measures the percentage of your site’s visits that weren’t quality visits. A visitor is considered “bounced” out of your site if they’ve only viewed a single page, hit the back button or typed in a new URL as soon as they entered your site, or anything else that results in a brief stay. For example, a bounce rate in the 70s is high because it shows that 7 out of 10 visitors didn’t interact with your site.
·Pages Per Visit: This number helps quantify engagement. How many pages did people view on your site? A “good” number for this metric will depend on the content of your site and it’s design. If your site’s content is on a few pages, a lower Pagers Per Visit metric isn’t terrible. If you have a ton of pages with loads of products or services and other information, you’ll want that number to be higher.
·Average Visit Duration: How long did a person spend on your website? 20 seconds, or 5 minutes? Again, whether this number is “good” or not will depend on the type of content on your site.
·Traffic Sources: Google Analytics breaks down all of the traffic sources that got visitors to your website. You can view the metrics for search-related sources, referrals from other sites, or direct hits from bookmarks or typing in the URL. Under the Search portion you can see which keywords visitors typed in before landing at your domain. Similarly, Referral numbers are important. Do your top referrals come from links on popular industry sites, social media, mobile, or some combination of these? Knowing these numbers can help you plan an effective marketing strategy. There’s no reason not to use Google Analytics
Google Analytics can truly be the foundation of a successful online marketing plan. There are plenty of experts who know the metrics and their consequences inside and out, but even casual users can glean plenty of useful data from Analytics.

Features and Benefits of the Evernote Suite of Products
Evernote is a suite of software tools designed for taking notes, saving information and organizing files and documents. The basic products are free, but you do have to pay a fee for the premium services. The software runs on all major desktop and mobile operating systems, including Windows, iOS, Android and Blackberry.

Evernote Products
The Evernote product suite includes the following eight products:

Evernote: The signature product allows you to create “notes”. Notes can be nearly anything, including images, text messages, podcasts or even web pages via the Web Clipper feature. Since Evernote is a cloud-based app, all of your notes can be accessed from any device, and all notes are updated simultaneously. Share your notes with coworkers or colleagues, making it easy to collaborate and keep everyone up-to-date. Use this software for a variety of activities, including taking meeting notes, collecting research, or planning your business itinerary. Use the audio feature to capture important talks from conferences.
Skitch: Skitch allows you to markup documents, images or presentations with text or by adding arrows and shapes. Rather than adding a lot of comments to a document, use arrows to point directly to an element in an image or add a green check to a document to show that presentations have been reviewed and approved.
Penultimate: Penultimate is Evernote’s iPad handwriting app. Using a stylus, Penultimate allows you to take handwritten notes directly in to your Evernote notebooks without the paper. Add drawings, doodles or side-notes just as you would in handwritten notes. For those who prefer writing to typing, this app makes note-taking more convenient. And because your notes are stored within your Evernote account, your Penultimate notes are searchable and easy to share with collaborators.
Evernote Web Clipper: Bookmarking web pages used to be the only way to save important research or interesting articles. With Evernote Web Clipper, you can clip either certain sections of a page or an entire web page and save it to your account. If you’re collecting stats for a presentation or just for a business use case, the app lets you pull together all of your research into a single file. Web Clipper is a cloud-based application, meaning that you can access your saved web pages from any device, including your desktop, tablet, laptop and smartphone.
Evernote Hello: It’s hard to remember all of the people that you meet when networking or at meetings and conferences. Evernote Hello allows you to create a virtual Rolodex of people, including where you met them, how you interacted with them and other history.
Evernote Food: Evernote Food keeps track of all your favorite recipes and food. For business people on the go, you can also use this app to find new restaurants when you’re out of town.
Evernote Clearly: When you’re reading a blog, pop-up ads can obscure the text and even slow down how fast the page loads on your device. Evernote Clearly removes these distracting ads from the text, leaving you with a clean version of the post. Aside from making for a better reading experience, it also provides you with an ad-free post if you need to use it for a presentation or marketing materials. Plus, the product allows you to save the post for later reading, i.e. when flying home from a conference.
Evernote Peek: Evernote Peek is an iPad app that turns your notes into virtual study guides. It works in conjunction with the iPad Smart Cover or the Evernote Peek Virtual Cover, and it essentially allows you to create “virtual flashcards”. Peek under the edge of your Smart Cover to view the question or clue, then lift the cover all the way up to see the answer. Questions and clues are created from your own Evernote notes; the title of your note is the clue, and the body of the note is the answer. Use this app to prepare for a presentation, learn new material, or even to learn a new language to improve your overall business skills.

Evernote’s product suite combines the functionality of a note-taking app with a virtual filing cabinet that you and your team can access anywhere.