What value does your site offer that is distinctive from any other site? Now this is not a very different question from one you should be asking yourself about your business in general – what makes your business different from every other similar business in your area, why will someone choose you?

Is your site well branded? Your branding should dovetail harmoniously into all your business branding – when someone comes to your site they need to ‘know’ that they are with you, and feel good whenever they see your branding.

Is your site optimised for search engines? It is critical to remember that if you want your site to attract new customers, they have to find you, and that happens through a search engine. If your site does not come up in the first 10 results the chances of someone finding you diminishes greatly.

Do you offer your visitors a site that is easy to find information on, easy to contact you for more information and the ability to get exactly what they want on the spot?

This is a harder one as some business lend themselves perfectly to shopping cart services, but maybe it’s information they need from your site to bring them to making contact. Whatever it is you need to identify this clearly and ensure your site provides it.

If you have a web site it must be included in your business plan and treated as a high priority – keep it relevant, informative and updated regularly!

How are you going to do this?

Social networking has become the buzz word for everyone including business.

Like it or not, it is becoming a part of the workplace, but should sites like Facebook be used and how?

Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites at the moment and it seems that ‘anyone who is anyone’ can be found there.

Is it ethical to use Facebook to check up on existing or potential staff?

Are you losing productivity to staff being logged into a site like this?

Are they just chatting inanely about their private life or is information about your business at risk?

Facebook is often used as a gossip avenue, and work gossip is nothing new, but it used to be restricted to hallways, staff rooms and telephones.

It can be surprising what people will write on these sites, especially in the heat of the moment.

There have even been many cases of employees losing their jobs through Facebook. There is no accounting for stupidity really – imagine calling in to work sick, then writing on Facebook that you are hung over or have a hot date and have chucked a sickie! Well it happens around the globe and is likely to continue to happen.

What about putting your business on Facebook?

This is becoming increasingly popular and could be a very innovative idea.

However I would strongly recommend that before you do this you analyse – why would I do it, who will look after the profile, what would I want broadcast about the business, how does it fit my business plan, who will become our friends and how much paid time will be needed to keep the page updated? No point in having a Facebook page that is not updated often, people expect regular updates there!

There are a host of brilliant web tools out there for business, but don’t just use them all simply because you can.

Business owners and high-level managers suffer burn out all too commonly, because they simply work too hard too long.
For many it becomes a case of feeling that taking any time off would be a luxury, and there is simply too much work on the desk to afford such luxuries.
Studies show that taking time off is not a luxury, but a necessity to prevent health issues and burnout and actually increase productivity.

One effective way of reducing working stress and increasing productivity
is to take a ‘working sabbatical’.

Consider taking even just a single week ‘off work’ and going to a retreat holiday location.

This could be local, but is even better if you totally remove yourself geographically. During this sabbatical you can relax in a holiday environment, and yet spend time each day working on the creative and innovative sides of your business.

This concept allows you to put yourself in a different head space, which allows you to begin to think outside of the square and consider concepts you may never even be able to imagine whilst in your work environment.

Imagine sitting on a beach, or in a rainforest reworking your business plan, cash flow projections, new innovation concepts or company structure.

OK maybe you would rather be at this location and not be working at all, but how difficult are you finding working on your business whilst in the office, and are you even taking holidays? How many distractions of the day-to-day workings of your business just keep piling up in front of you causing stress preventing you from being creative and innovative?
Google give their staff 20% of their working time to creative development, whilst 3M give 15%. During this creative time out of the working day the Post-it Note and Scotch tape were invented – now how much business and profit did this generate?

Remember being told computers would create a paperless office?

I hear complaints that more paper is generated than ever before and the paperless office is a myth.

How did we get into this situation and what can we do about it?

The obvious place to start is at the printer.

Recycling paper whenever possible does assist reducing waste. Train yourself and your staff to stop before printing and ask ‘why am I printing this?’

If you have no valid reason - don’t!

$4.2 billion is spent annually on Australian business postage. Add the cost of paper, ink or toner and much of your profit is being wasted, apart from environmental considerations.

Most large companies have introduced electronic billing, but many small businesses have not yet followed this practice. I’ve seen small business offices printing a copy for the client and a copy for the office. This stems from the old practice of having a carbon copy invoice book, but the analogy is incorrect. If you created the invoice electronically, your carbon copy is on the computer. The problem is that often that they don’t trust the computer and want their own hard copy. Still the expense piles up and affects your bottom line every day.

Information has become a huge business commodity and staff are constantly downloading large documents from the internet. Best practice is to store that document on a network and share it electronically with all staff, rather than end up with many printed copies of the document, especially if it is going to be outdated in a short period of time.

I was stunned yesterday when I attended an online conference and all attendees were instructed to print a 58 page reference document!

There is a terrific widget, free for small business, that tracks paper usage on a network allowing managers to identify where the heaviest printer usage is coming from and begin to combat the issue.