Byte To Byte With Steve Johnsen

If you're like most business owners, you know you need a website, but you may not be clear exactly why. What is your site supposed to do? This podcast will help you clarify what kind of website you want to have. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen and today I want to talk to you about the three different types of website that you can have. If you're like most business owners, you know you need a website, but you may not be clear exactly why. Are you using your website to sell products? To convince prospects your service is superior to the competition? Or simply to have a presence online? I always advise my clients that there are three main categories of websites, and when you choose to build (or rebuild) your website, you should be aware of what type of site you need (and what type you're building). The first type of website is what I refer to as a billboard: this is a site that just sits there and serves primarily as an online brochure. This kind of site can be helpful when you only need to "prove" you are a legitimat

There is a huge opportunity to use online reviews to grow your business, and today I will give you some tips on how to do exactly that. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and today I want to talk about how to grow your business with online reviews. This is the second episode in a two-part podcast about using online reviews to grow your business. Last time we talked about the huge discrepancy between the way business owners and consumers look at online reviews. Close to 95% of consumers trust and are paying attention to online reviews, and less than half of business owners do the same. Less than a third of business owners are proactively managing their online reviews. We talked about some of the reasons why business owners are not leveraging online reviews as much as they could. We also looked at some studies by Harvard Business School, Berkeley, Microsoft, etc. on how much you can grow your business and sales with online reviews. We saw how a one-point jump in your star rating can have a huge impact on your conversio

Most business owners ignore reviews, and most consumers really pay attention to them. Why is this? This podcast explores the impact that online reviews can have on your business. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and today I want to talk about the impact of online reviews on your business. This is the first of a two-part podcast about using online reviews to grow your business. Today we're going to get into some of the reasons that business owners are not leveraging online reviews as much as they could, and look at some studies by Harvard Business School, Berkeley, Microsoft, etc. on how much you can grow your business and sales with online reviews. In the next podcast, we'll get into some of the details of how to get reviews, the best ways to manage online reviews, as well as some specific tips regarding Yelp. Most business owners ignore reviews, and most consumers really pay attention to them. Why is this? Well, let's talk about some of the reasons why business owners don't pay that much attention to online review

A lot of us pride ourselves on being really good multitaskers, and as entrepreneurs we find ourselves having to wear a lot of hats. But today I want to talk to you about a principle that runs contrary to all of these ideas, and it's called the power of focus. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen and today I want to talk to you about the power of focus. I've been reading an awesome book by Gary Keller (the founder of Keller Williams—the real estate brokerage). Gary's book is called The ONE Thing. He writes about the amazing power of focus in work and in life. The key to success, Gary tells us, is to figure out what is the #1 most important thing to be doing and forget everything else. Now, a lot of us have no problem with wanting to figure out what is the #1 most important thing, but I find myself often wanting to take care of three or four or maybe five really important things in my business. But as Gary points out in his book, the key to being really successful (not just moderately successful but really successful) is

There are a number of programs that promise you traffic to your website, followers on Facebook and Twitter, or a steady content feed for your blog that can seriously hurt your online presence and your sales. Watch out for these!

Buying leads can be a great way to get some sales in the door quickly, but there are also a lot of situations where buying leads is not a good idea. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and today and want to talk about buying leads. I have an upcoming podcast in which I will talk about levels of marketing. The simple idea is that Level 1 marketing tactics are easy to implement (anyone can do it), don't require much up-front investment of time or money, get to their results quickly (either positive or negative), are completely non-unique (meaning you're not different from anybody else). Typically, these are methods where the more you spend the more you get. One popular Level 1 marketing tactic is buying leads. The theory is that someone else has invested the time and effort to build an online brand, put the effort into search engine optimization, and has contact information for prospective customers to sell to you. In theory, this is a fantastic idea. I can skip the time and investment needed to build up an online brand

There are three words you can use that guarantee failure in just about any endeavor, including both business and personal life. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and today I want to talk to you about three words that will guarantee failure in your personal and professional endeavors. My friend Gary Barnes does an exercise in his boot camps. He asks everyone in the audience to put their pen on the table, and then instructs them to try to pick it up. Most people figure out after two or three times how to follow the instructions correctly—"Trying" to pick up the pen is not the same as actually picking it up! The words, "I will try," sound very positive, but in fact are a code for, "I am not committed to seeing this happen." If I ask someone to come to one of my training events and they say "I will try," I know that it will never really happen. Remember when Luke Skywalker's spaceship was stuck in the swamp? Luke thought it would be too hard, so when Yoda told him to get it out of the swamp, he said "I will try." In the

We sometimes think that life will get better if we have more, but the reality is that life usually improves with subtraction, not addition. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen and I want to talk to you today about a distinction called "More versus Less." A distinction is something that you see about how things work in life, and once you see it, you get it. It's not necessarily a fact you learn or a new piece of information, but it's something you have to see. This distinction today, "More versus Less," can also be called "Addition versus Subtraction." A lot of times you might think, "Life will get better if I add more things to my life." "Life will get better if I have a boat." "Life will get better if I have a second car." "Life will get better if I add a new gadget." "Life will get better if I add a new activity." "Life will get better if I add more friends." "Life will get better if I sign up for a dance class." But the reality is that very often life gets better not with more but rather with less—if I get rid of so

Why do companies spend so much on advertising, where the benefit is so small—while simultaneously investing so little in search engine optimization, where the benefit is so large? Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and today I want to talk to you about multiplying your marketing ROI (return on investment). I've noticed a really interesting paradox in the business world. There are many companies that spend a lot on advertising, and get very little benefit, while at the same time they invest very little in SEO (search engine optimization), when the benefit could be huge. We're all familiar with the fact that advertising has become MUCH less effective than it used to be. DVRs, DVDs, Netflix, new cable channels, online channels, mp3s, mp4s, iPods, and smart phones all compete for a dwindling share of the consumer's vanishing attention span. However, US companies still spend about $30 on advertising for every $1 they spend on SEO. Why is that? I believe that advertising is still popular because it is easily understood. Ma

Serving versus pleasing: these are absolutely not the same thing, and getting the distinction between the two will make the difference between success and failure. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen. I talked in episode 7 about how "Wealth Comes from Service." I got a few questions about that, so today I want to talk about a key distinctions between serving and pleasing. First, let me define what I mean by a distinction. A distinction is more than a piece of information. It's even more than a concept. It's something that you really have to see. Once you see it, you get it deep down in your core, deep down in your gut. Then it's something that you can't unsee. The distinction that I want to talk about today is called serving versus pleasing. This is a distinction that was somewhat hard for me to get, and occasionally I still get confused and forget about what I'm doing and end up pleasing people instead of serving. You know that wealth comes through service. Wealth comes through serving others. And yet, there are peopl

The mundane tasks of routine maintenance may seem unimportant in the short term, but in the long run it's those little things that will really propel you forward. Hi, I'm Steve Johnsen and I want to share a little story today about "The Keeper of the Springs." The late Peter Marshall was an eloquent speaker and for several years served as the chaplain of the US Senate. He used to love to tell the story of the "Keeper of the Springs," a quiet forest dweller who lived high above an Austrian village along the eastern slope of the Alps. The old gentleman had been hired many years earlier by a young town councilman to clear away the debris from the pools of water up in the mountain crevices that fed the lovely spring flowing through their town. With faithful, silent regularity, he patrolled the hills, removed the leaves and branches, and wiped away the silt that would otherwise have choked and contaminated the fresh flow of water. The village soon became a popular attraction for vacationers. Graceful swans floated

Transitioning from doing the work to being a business owner: there's a lot to learn! Hi, I'm Steve Johnsen, and today we're going to talk about transitioning from doing the work in a business—from being a technician—to being a business owner. There's actually a lot to learn. I'll give you an example of somebody who worked for a roofer. He started out putting shingles on the roof and swinging a hammer and eventually worked his way up to where he was managing a crew—and then managing several crews. And he decided that he was going to go out on his own and start his own roofing company. Well, suddenly you've got a very different job when you're a business owner as opposed to when you were running and managing just the roofing work. As a business owner, you're now responsible for marketing, you're responsible for sales, you're responsible for human resources—hiring people, payroll, etc. You're responsible for pricing your services. You have to take care of insurance and taxes and even legal issues related to the

Work is a game. Life is a game. And the harder you play the game, the more fun it is. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and I want to talk to you about playing full out in your life and in your business. A few years ago (at least one or two), when I was in really good shape, my brother and I would play pickup basketball with our youth group. We never cared about the score. My brother and I made sure that all the players got to handle the ball, regardless of skill level. We never argued over the points, and we cheered when the opposing team made a good play. But we always played to win, because that meant playing FULL OUT, and that was when the game was fun. Why is it that so many people enjoy watching the Olympics? What is it about these performances that is so emotional? Because something in us responds when we see people playing the game as if their lives depended on it. It's a beautiful thing to see people leave everything on the field, playing their hearts out, playing FULL OUT. The thrill of victory...the agony

If you're posting things on Facebook and wanting to get business from it, make sure your posts are shareable. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen and I wanted to share a quick tip with you on how to make sure your Facebook posts are shareable. Sometimes I post to Facebook and it's something that I just want to share with my friends, so I can use the default "share with friends" option when I'm posting. Sometimes—actually, a lot of times—when I post things on Facebook, it's information that I think might be useful to anybody, and I'd like it to be accessible to the public. A lot of times when I'm posting something related to business on Facebook it would be great if when people read it and like it, they would share it with their friends, and then their friends would share it with their friends…That's the very definition of something going viral on Facebook. When I share with my friends, and then my friends share with their friends, and then the friends of friends share with their friends, it can reach a large audience v

One of the keys to making your website your number 1 employee is actually getting people to your website. Although there are a lot of good methods for getting traffic to your site, here are a few that you should really avoid. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen and I'm going to give a quick tip today about three things you should definitely avoid when promoting your website. Somehow, there are persistent myths about these three methods of driving traffic to your website—but myths can sometimes be harmful. Link directory submitter Sure, your Google ranking is affected by who is linking to your website. However, that doesn't mean that more is better. Link directory submission is bad news for a lot of reasons. First, if your website goes from no inbound links to 2,000+ overnight, don't you think Google is smart enough to figure out it was done by a software program? And as soon as they do, they will discount all the links. In addition, you are known by the company you keep. Not only will it not help your website to hav

There are some basic, fundamental fears and early childhood conditioning that we have to overcome in order to be successful in any business endeavor. You may have learned all your life not to stand out, to be nice to everyone, and to be cautious around money, and that ingrained behavior will absolutely kill any chance of business success unless we unlearn it. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and I'm going to talk to you today about three prerequisites to business success. There are three things that you need to absolutely solve before you can be successful in any kind of business. There may be some fundamental principles that we learned when we were young that need to be unlearned before we can be successful in business. So getting comfortable with these three things is going to be a prerequisite to business success. The first of these is that you need to be willing to be seen. One of the things that we typically learn by the time we're in junior high school is how to blend in. We learn how not to stand out. Often

In any kind of creative endeavor, there's a place where the magic happens. When you hit that place, your work flows effortlessly, and your business can even become sublime. That's the magic that we're aiming for whenever we tackle a new project. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and I want to talk to you about magic. Specifically, the magic that happens when you have a team that's working on a project and things just start clicking. They start firing in unison, and the work just begins to flow. There's a place where this magic happens, and it's much more than the mechanical execution of the required steps. This kind of magic happens in music. It happens in coaching. It happens in sports. It can happen in your business. It can even happen with a good web design team. If you were to describe a concert that you went to, you could talk about what all the people are doing individually. One person is rubbing some steel strings with a plastic pick, and another one is banging on a membrane with a stick. Another person might

Great artists are emotionally invested in their work, and we can learn some lessons from Michelangelo about how to get the best results from your artists. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen and today I want to talk about web design as art. Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) was considered to be one of the greatest artists of his day, and has been considered so ever since. Some of his most famous works, the Pieta and David, were made when he was only in his twenties. His crowning achievement, though, may be the work he did not want to do. In 1508, Michelangelo began painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the request of Pope Julius II. Michelangelo maintained that he was not a painter. All he wanted to do was sculpt statues. But the pope was pretty persistent, and eventually Michelangelo agreed to paint the ceiling "for God." It took him four years of physically exhausting work to complete it. One thing that Michelangelo insisted on was that he would only do the ceiling if the pope let him paint it in his own wa

Myth: Anyone with a computer can design a website. Well, anyone with a computer can get a website online. But just having the right tools does not make you an expert—and there's a lot more to web design than getting some information online. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and today I want to talk about another myth that is very common related to the internet and websites, and that is that anyone with a computer can design a website. Well, it's probably true that anyone with a computer can produce a website but that is not quite the same as designing a website. And even though anyone with a design program—with the graphic design software—might have the tools to design a website with, it does require some experience to design an effective website. I would say this: that just having the right tools doesn't make you an expert. For example, I might have the most sophisticated spreadsheet program in the world, but that doesn't make me a chief financial officer. The CFO of a corporation needs to have the experience to un

It's really easy to confuse wealth with things or money. But true wealth actually comes from service—from you serving others and others serving you. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and I'd like to talk to you today about a common misconception about wealth—that it equates to having a lot of things or a lot of money. This couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, wealth comes from service and is service. Put another way, wealth comes from our relationships with other people. Here's a brief thought experiment inspired by the work of Rabbi Daniel Lapin. Imagine that everyone in the world has made you their heir, and then suddenly everyone dies. You are now the owner of trillions upon trillions of dollars. You own all of the gold in the world, all of the silver in the world, even all of the banks in the world. Every car, every private jet, every yacht, and every expensive toy on the planet belongs to you. You own all of the world's real estate, including every high-rent office building in every city on the plane