by Heather T. | Jun 21, 2022 | Email, Email Marketing, Operations, Opinion
Many business owners are overwhelmed by email, some more than others.
Many are just overloaded by industry information, newsletters, and other material they want to keep up on or are interested in.
Email boxes can also get clogged by special offers and specials from companies a business owner might buy from, both professionally and personally.
I want to share my method for keeping my email box in check. It’s not a quick fix, but it’s well worth it if you get a ton of email that is not directly related to customers or clients. It is easy, though, you just have to stick with it for a little bit.
This method can be used for any type of email, whether it’s local news, special offers from Lowe’s, or anything else you want to apply it to.
I call it the rule of three. It means that whether it’s a daily email, a weekly, or monthly email, you want to get at least three interesting articles of learning, a special offer you will actually use or take advantage of, or important news from a newsletter throughout its distribution period.
So a daily email needs to have at least three relevant outgoing links over the course of a week. Or three links per three weeks or three months if that is the time distribution.
People statistically sign up for a newsletter more often than they might think. They may go shopping somewhere, either online or off, and get added (or add themselves) to a newsletter.
While some people just cruise through and delete non-relevant emails, it still takes a few minutes, even more time if you spend the time opening them. That small time period starts to add up over the course of a week, a month, a year……
Periodically I make a list of all the emails I get on a weekly and monthly basis, and I keep track of them. I open up Excel and save the file, but keep it open on my desktop so when I do my morning review of non-client emails before I get into regular work mode, I can log them.
I don’t count the links I clicked because the title was catchy and caused me to click into it, I log the articles and links I found useful.
An excel spreadsheet or Google sheets work very well for this, or if you prefer old school, put your titles in a blank sheet and make hash marks on it.
There will always be some very important newsletters, and I bold those because regardless of the frequency of good articles, you may need them for business, or they are very important to read even if it’s not every single email. As you can see from this example, there are several emails I subscribed to a few months ago because I thought they sounded interesting that need to go.
You can also bold/highlight or colorize an individual numerical group. There is no wrong way to go about this, but actually reviewing your incoming email can really help with time management as well as your own sanity in getting overwhelmed (or not) with emails.
I’ve used this system for years to manage my inbox and have found it works well.
by Heather T. | Jan 13, 2022 | Marketing, Operations
I recently had a friend ask me how to do competition research best online. I’ve also done several workshops on this prior.
Competition research or comp research is very easy to do; it’s just time-consuming and if you want to do it right (suggested!), do the time; it will be well worth it.
Step one and you can do this is a spreadsheet, or you can do it in MSWord or Google Docs. I like using a combination of both, a spreadsheet in Google Sheets for the base information and then linking it to a Google Doc with more information. I also like to take screenshots, LOTs of screenshots. Screenshots of their website, screenshots of their social media posts, as well as screenshots of reviews, both good and bad.
Some specific things I look for are an email newsletter (if so, sign up!) Do they post consistently on social media, and are they getting engagement from what they are doing (or not) if certain posts or post types are getting high engagement, screenshot them!
While on a PC you can take a full screenshot using “PrtScn” on your keyboard, I prefer the snipping tool that comes standard. It is in the Start Menu under Windows Accessories. It lets you be selective about what you snip and allows you to mark the image up.
For Mac users, instructions here on screenshots https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201361
A few of the other things I look for are their reviews. Do they respond to reviews, just the bad or the good and the bad, or not at all? How are the review responses? Are they well crafted and polite and try to address the problem, or are they defensive and combative?
You can learn a lot from reading competitors’ reviews, both from their excellent reviews (these are key things your business will have to concentrate on competing with) and the bad (these are things your business can excel at and blow away the competitors). Check all the review sites, Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp, BBB, etc.
Have they optimized their directory listings and their social media accounts? Do their links work? Do their links to social media channels from their website work? I’m always surprised by how many businesses don’t pay attention to this; they change their social media handle but forget to update the links on their websites.
In reviewing competitors, social media listings look at who they follow (its public to view) and who follows them. Keep an eye out for an overabundance of fake follower accounts. They are easy to spot once you start to eyeball them. You can also quickly tell if someone has a high follower/like count but zero engagement on posts. Please don’t buy followers. Yes, it is cheap to do, but it does nothing for you except inflating your following and dinging your credibility. And there is no value as a business owner for doing so.
While there are a lot of paid sites out there where you can do backlink research, my personal favorite https://www.semrush.com/ (not an affiliate link), I like the program; they generally have a free trial period that I encourage businesses with limited budgets to take advantage of. For anyone who needs to do high-level ongoing research, the pricing at $120 a month can be worth it.
You can do all of this research using a tool, but I also like doing it organically because when you search for the business in Google and Bing (and do both because you will get differing returns), you also see the snippets from the sites that are linking to your competition. It can help if you see a competitor is linked from a site that’s relevant and it’s a junk link connection, rather than one of the research tools which gives you the link.
The easiest way to do this is to go to Google and Bing and put in variations. Put the information in quotes for the best return: “Business Name” ie. “Jane Doe Inn.” If it has an LLC or other variations, Google those too. “Phone number,” ie “860-555-1212” and then their domain name. Don’t add the http/https or the www (if they include it), just the domain and the extension ending, i.e., “janedoeinn.com.”
This is a base of what I use, and then I add additional things like pricing, like services, what they offer etc.
Business Name:
Name:
Physical and Mailing Address(es):
Phone Number(s):
Email Address(s):
Domain Name: ( ie. https://www.janedoeinn.com)
Notes:
ADA Score: (I use Lighthouse for this. https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse)
Notes:
SEO Score: (I use Lighthouse for this as well)
Notes:
Mobile Friendly: (Is their website? Some sites look great on a computer, not so much on a cell phone or tablet)
GMB: (this is Google My Business, add the full URL))
Reviews: (how many reviews, review rating, do they respond? Don’t forget those screenshots)
Notes:
GA Analytics: Yes/No
(this is Google Analytics, you can see if they are using it and the next note as well about Plugins by putting their domain name/url into https://builtwith.com/ . This is also useful because it will tell you what the site was built with.
Plugins if WP: (WP is WordPress, you may see some things you like on a WordPress site, like a photo slider or gallery and you can find out what plugin was used)
Blog: (add the full URL)
Followers (IA): (IA is If Available, some blogs have that public)
Notes:
Average blog post word count:
Newsletter: (what are they using? Constant Contact? Mailchimp? Other?)
Notes:
Privacy Policy: (I add yes or no but if yes add the link, same with the ADA policy)
ADA Policy: (This refers to ADA Website Compliance, add the full URL)
Covid Statement: (If yes add the full URL)
Facebook: (add the full URL, ie https://www.facebook.com/janedoeinn)
Likes:
Followers:
Notes:
What Kind of Content are they posting?
Facebook Ads: (You can see if a page is running or has run Facebook ads, not boosts, just ads, by scrolling down on the left hand side of a business page to “Page Transparency”. When you click on that, you can go to “Ad Library”.
Reviews: (number and comments)
Notes:
If you really want to dive deep, track down the owner’s and manager’s personal profiles, I realize this seems rather stalkerish. From a business research standpoint, most people don’t have their profiles totally locked down. You can gain some very valuable business information about what groups they belong to, as well as whether they are sharing their business posts onto their personal profiles.
Instagram: (add the full URL)
Followers:
Following:
Notes:
What Kind of Content are they posting?
Twitter: (add the full URL)
Followers:
Following:
Notes:
What Kind of Content are they posting?
Youtube: (add the full URL)
Followers:
Notes:
What Kind of Content are they posting?
Pinterest: (add the full URL)
Followers:
Following:
Notes:
Linkedin Page: (add the full URL)
Followers:
Follower
Notes:
What Kind of Content are they posting?
If the primary owners or managers have personal Linkedin accounts, I also like to take a look at them. If you don’t want accounts to know you have viewed their profile, you can go into your own personal Linkedin settings and change how you appear. Go to “Me” then “settings and privacy”. Then “Visibility” on the left side and “Visibility of your profile & network”. Next in the middle, go to “Profile viewing options”. If you select “private mode”, I recommend that you log out of Linkedin and then log back in and check. I’ve heard reports that sometimes it doesn’t take, and it is better to log back in and check to make sure before assuming.
Other Ads/Google PPC: (if you use a tool like Semrush and many others, they will tell you if comps are running ads)
Notes:
Yelp: (add the full URL)
Reviews: (number and comments)
BBB: (add the full URL)
Reviews: (number and comments)
Bing: (add the full URL)
Indeed: (add the full URL)
Employee Reviews: (number and comments)
Glassdoor: (add the full URL)
Employee Reviews: (number and comments)
Checking Employer review sites give you an excellent insight into the competition.
Sites of Interest/Linked from:
Review your comp lists every three months or optimally every month or the very most every six months. Competitors change pricing, change offerings, change services, bring on new key staff or have them leave.
If you are not looking at your competition, you can guarantee some of them are looking at you. And if you are not keeping an eye on their pricing changes or new offerings, you can lose business because you are not staying on top of it. The time spent on reviewing gathered information is well worth it.
by Heather T. | Nov 9, 2021 | Blog, Marketing, Operations, Social Media
This is an updated post on one I had done way back in 2010 (yikes it’s hard to believe that it’s been over decade, but still relevent) with bit more information and a couple of additional ideas.
I thought it might be time to update it, as it’s one of the most common questions I get from people, even when I tell them you know………. there are a ton of ideas and post ideas out there already floating around and don’t forget to look at what your competitions doing,
Sometimes people want some more specific ideas, so I thought it was time to give the post a little spiff up. I do find it kind of amusing that the old post refered to “fan pages”, Facebook’s original name for a business page.
(Keep in mind many of these could be in visual or image formats including video) Many can also be used for blog posts with some additional information and content. Visual/Image posts are best for Instagram. Linkedin business and personal pages, Facebook business pages and groups, and Twitter, it is best practice to try to share an image with text.
*Don’t forget to share links to your website often as well.
The number one mistake in using social media is forgetting to add targeted links to posts. People will not look for your website link if they don’t see it in the post itself.
If you have a product or service, you are promoting on social media make your links count. If you are talking about a particular service you offer, have the post link go to your services page where you talk more about the service, NOT to your homepage, you don’t want to make people have to hunt.
- A promotion.
a. Come and stay during the month of March and get two free ski tickets.
b. St. Patrick’s Day Special, get a complimentary green beer & popcorn with an order of bangers & mash (*must be 21) = 117 characters, still room for using a shortened link on Twitter.
c. Get double points on your Ace rewards card with every hardware purchase the first week of March.
d. With a purchase of any Don Fredo jewelry, get a free earring cleaning kit.
e. Get a full hair coloring treatment and receive a free trim.
f. At your next tire alignment, get a free oil change.
g. New accounting customers get a 10-minute free business analysis.
- A sale.
a. Thursday nights are half-price appetizers.
b. Sale though March 31 on Dunlop All-Season Radial Tires, save 20% off.
c. All Michelle Leslie tops and slacks on sale $15 off through this Sunday.
d. Stay 2 nights get the 3rd night 1/2 Off.
e. Two for one wool sock special every Saturday.
f. Mini-mart Super Gulps 99¢, 5-6 pm every Monday – Friday.
g. Photography special: Book a wedding with us and get an extra set of CD’s with your photos now through May 3.
- New products, services, specials, rebates, vouchers, offers, packages
- Recipes (recipes get one of the highest rates of pass-alongs in social media, if you are a retailer, share your Grandma’s killer brownie recipe and make it the next time you have a sale at your woodworking store. It doesn’t matter what business you are in. Also, Recipe failures with a funny story make great shared content.
- Guest, customer, or client comments or testimonials (with permission if sharing the full name).
- Your business in the news.
- Your business is getting or received an award.
- One of your employees is getting/or gotten an award, even if it’s of your creation, i.e., best salesperson of the month.
- Your area in the news.
- Promote any upcoming events. Open Houses, classes, workshops, webinars, networking, etc.
- A frequent and loyal guest, customer, or client in the news, please be aware of privacy though, depending on your business, a client may not feel comfortable with you sharing the information unless you know them well, it’s best practices to ask if it’s ok.
- Pictures of your business, interiors, exteriors, products (if applicable).
- Pictures of your employees.
- Pictures of happy guests, customers, or clients (with their permission and preferably in writing or verbally but documented).
- Area Events going on, you can also tie this into specials and promotions you are holding.
- A brief, “we get frequent questions “about” and put in answers.
- What does your business do to differentiate itself from others.
- Holiday Posts, a nice graphic or photo and a wish for a Happy Thanksgiving or other Holiday.
- You just found a new product you are using and love it, be it food or a new fabric softener or a new electric cordless drill; describe it and explain why you love it.
- Day of the Year posts. National Calendar days. May 20 is National Rescue Dog Day. It’s helpful if it ties into something related to your business. Two of your own dogs are rescues. One of your employees volunteers at the local dog shelter.
- Funny Loyal Guest, customer, or client stories. *caveat: make them funny and only funny, proof heavily to make sure they are not harmful or negative in any way. While someone may go into the wrong changing room by mistake at a store, and it may have had very amusing consequences, it raises things like, “don’t they have locks on the doors?” (even if you do and point out they didn’t lock them).
- Do some product/area/service-specific reviews. You have a couple of apple orchards nearby. Do some write-ups on the apples, do some research on types of apples, link to sources. You carry a particular line of clothing or cordless drills or snow tires; what is special/different/better/unique about them.
- A bio of your self or other owners or management.
- Bios of your staff.
- Interview customers. Keep in mind using video is always a bonus.
- Interview vendors.
- Helpful Tips: examples: restaurants; a good wine, lodging; cooking/baking tips, realtors: home buying tips, Landscapers: gardening tips, mechanics: car care tips, drycleaners: stain removal tips. For every type of business, there is always helpful information out there that someone can use.
- Industry News.
- Ask for feedback from blog readers, fans, followers, and from prior guests, customers, or clients. You just went from goose down pillows to memory foam pillows. If asking on a blog post, ask for some thoughts from people, and don’t forget to include the link to the blog article or post link when you do your next email blast. You just switched from using Redken products to Matrix Biolage in your salon. People love to be able to give feedback and asked what they think about things; this is an excellent medium for doing that, exploit it. Questions asked are great prompts, and you can get valuable information on your own business or something new you may be considering doing.
- Help wanted posts.
- Lists. List posts get high engagement. 10 of our top selling products. 12 of our favorite woodworking bloggers, 15 tips on saving money, 7 best places to go to get Sushi, etc.
- Links to resources, also great in list post format. 10 places to save money on your business insurance.
- If you are blogging, don’t forget to share your blog posts on your Facebook business page, your personal Facebook account, Facebook groups (if it’s permitted), Twitter and Linkedin personal and business pages. If blog posts have images (highly recommended), don’t forget to pin the image (with your blog post link) to Pinterest if you use it.
- Videos from Youtube, Vimeo and Tiktok.
- PSAs, especially ones that are relevant to what’s going on in the world today. Try to stay away from politics or religion.
- A Non-profit or charity you support.
- Your business contributing to the community or donating a product or service.
- A giveaway, contest or drawing. Please make sure you check each social media’s T.O.S (Terms of Service) before promoting these online, each has different requirements and disclosures.
A few ideas for Business Social Media Platform Shares
(Facebook (Personal, Business & Groups), Twitter, Pinterest, and Linkedin (Personal and Business)
While Instagram does have external apps to share posts, PLEASE ask permission first of the Instagram author. On Youtube, you can add videos to “Playlists”
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/57792?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop
and
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/57792?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid
If sharing on Facebook from a personal account, please ask permission first.
- A gorgeous photo taken of your town, your area, your state (make sure the author gets image credit, shares from a page, or their own group rather than uploading a photo are highly recommended so you don’t violate copyright.)
- A vendor or a company you buy from shares something of interest related to your product or business.
- Funny or amusing content, try to keep it clean.
- Helpful tips (not the same thing as Educational content as these are generally short form posts) from non-competitors.
- Educational content. A blog post from a Leadership expert with a little of your personal feelings about why you liked it or something that stood out about it.
by Heather T. | Aug 10, 2021 | Operations, Reputation Management, Social Media
Unfortunately, yes you probably should, but before anyone yells, “invasion of privacy,” I mean the public face of your employee’s social media, so what they post on public forums, Facebook pages, and groups, Twitter, Instagram, etc. You legally can’t ask them for passwords and access to closed accounts, so I wouldn’t recommend it.
This periodically comes up when I see employees posting negative content about their employers or, even worse in the case of a boutique hotel many years ago in Maine, posting about guests, by name!
One of my favorite examples is the infamous Damian Cardone, who almost caused the restaurant he worked at to close down because of his public Facebook comments about serving gluten dishes to gluten free guests. And this wasn’t Tavern on the Green, but the restaurant he was working at when he made the posts.
I know it’s one more thing to do on top of trying to do your regular marketing, plus run a business, But…. If any employee’s posts can very negatively impact your business, it’s worth periodically double-checking. Loss of income, especially now, is never a good thing.
Yesterday on a local very active Facebook forum with over 18 thousand members, someone posted a picture of a few people picketing about their workplace’s new mask mandate. Whether you wear a mask or not, or believe we should be vaccinated or not, I’m not going to comment. As someone who last year lost several relatives and friends to Covid, I think you can probably tell where my thoughts lie, and I’ll leave it at that.
On the post, a very vocal young woman was ranting about not getting the vaccine and refusing to wear a mask, and when you hover over her post, you can see where she works.
As someone quite concerned about safety, especially with the Delta variant circulating, this was quite disturbing. She presently works at a local convience store (with the town listed on her profile), and even worse, is a housekeeper/cleaner at a large lodging facility (business name listed on profile). I certainly know I won’t be visiting that local convience store anytime soon nor booking a room at the facility which is in a neighboring state. Which, according to their website has both a mask mandate and an employee vaccination mandate.
I think other people may have commented/messaged both her, and possibly her workplaces about this already because she had removed the information about employment from her Facebook profile as of this morning. I did not report this, but was seriously thinking about it which is why I looked, but someone or someone(s) apparently already did. And I think they posted on the Facebook Business lodging pages reviews tab as well, which was public yesterday, because the review tab is now hidden.
So how many people have those businesses potentially lost or people who have now a negative opinion of the business? Even one is a potential lost customer and loss of revenue and future revenue. From this reference point, on this forum of 18K people, this thread already has 199 comments and who knows how many hundreds or perhaps a thousand or more people have read the post AND the comments and perhaps also saw who this person who ranted worked for…. Food for thought….
If your business falls on that side of the fence where you don’t care if you dissuade people from using your business (for whatever reason), that’s your prerogative and nothing I say or anyone else says will change your mind, so be it. But if you care about your business’s reputation, you should be keeping an eye out.
Sadly, Covid, masking and vaccinations are not the only reason, and the only time, you should be monitoring your employee’s public-facing posts. I have documented hundreds of instances where employees are publicly badmouthing employers, managers, and the businesses that they work at. Great examples for reputation management workshops and I do try to be cognizant of not sharing names of people or businesses unless they are permently closed, like Union Street Guest House, not a case of an employee misstepping online, but instead the owner’s misstepping, but a perfect example of what can backfire online and come back to haunt a business.
This boils down to essential reputation management of your business, where you should be monitoring what people are saying about your business, whether its customers, guests, clients OR employees.
I’d recommend you check your state for what is allowable and what is not in terms of social media and access, as well as specifics on what you are allowed to view on your own company’s computers in regards to employee’s social media. I’d also recommend checking what is considered just cause for termination or fines for employee’s posts.
Posting about bad working conditions or harassment at work falls into personal postings that can’t, and in most cases shouldn’t, be a fireable or finable offense. If an employee is tweeting about being harassed at work, as an employer, you need to look into this pronto, not punish the employee. I’d recommend reading Can You Get Fired if Your Boss Doesn’t Like What You Post on Social Media? from Jackson Spenser Law Group.
NOLO also has a good overview by state, but I would check on your state government-specific website for specifics and the most up-to-date laws as they do change when asking about permissible information to ask and have access to in regards to employee personal accounts.
As a business owner, setting up Google Alerts (free) for your personal name and your business name is suggested. Putting the information in quotes will give you better results.
Periodically doing a Google and Bing search for your personal name and your business name is also suggested (again putting in quotes gives you more specific results), Google Alerts and even the other paid monitoring tools don’t catch 100%.
In terms of employees, before hiring, take a gander at their social accounts (the public side) before hiring. Over 70% of employers do look at that information before hiring, and I have many clients that will ask me to take a look at possible employees who are applying and see what I can find. Considering I’ve found public posts about drinking on the job, stealing products from a current workplace and a lot more that for an emploer would raise some big red flags. It’s scary what’s out there and what people will post publicly.
A tip on looking for a potential employee’s or current employee’s public-facing social media accounts, most people use the same handle or username across most platforms.
Know the law before acting on something that an employee posted. And protect yourself by being proactive; your own business reputation can be at risk. And loss of revenue as well.
From an employee’s perspective, consider what you are posting and where, and who can see it, and the potential repercussions. If you don’t care, again just like an employer’s prerogative to post or believe what they want, that is entirely up to you, but if it meant the potential loss of a job, only you can decide whether it’s worth it or not. If it’s harming the business you work for, that IS on you.
by Heather T. | Apr 21, 2021 | Marketing, Operations
On the second two photos you can see a watermark, see one on the first one? No? But it “might” have a digital watermark.
As anyone who has sat in on one of my workshops or seminars and heard me stress the importance of making sure any photos you use on your website are legal, this will be preaching to the choir. If not, I want to revisit this for anyone who has not heard me rant about the importance of checking provenance.
What IS the provenance of images? Making sure you know where they came from legally.
In the last few years, I’ve lost count of the number of people who have run into copyright-related issues because they, OR their website developers, have run into an issue with copyright and photo/image usage.
If a client provides a photo to a web developer for use on the client’s website, the client is clearly at fault and needs to work with the photographer and/or agency to resolve the copyright claim.
Unfortunately, some web developers also provide stock photos (provenance unknown) for clients’ websites. The client gets hit with a copyright suit, and the web developer does not take responsibility for it, even though they were the ones who supplied the image.
A few more things to note, this can also happen when a web developer (legitimately) buys stock photos for a website. Then a client transfers the site away from the web developer to someone else and doesn’t obtain the licensing information for the photo.
Or the photo is obtained from a “free” stock photo site, and the site is not 100% safe (I’d say most of the free stock photo sites are questionable) because who knows if the photographer claiming ownership is the owner) and you also can’t see what’s called a Digimarc watermark or other types of invisible-to-the-eye watermark systems. Many copyrighted photos have tracked back to Getty Images from free stock photo sites, so I tend not to trust any of them.
I’m particularly anal-retentive about photo copyright because many, many years ago, when I was still doing website design, I obtained a photo that I thought was free and clear from what at the time was a legitimate free stock photo site and used it on a client’s website.
My client received a cease and desist letter from Getty Images, and even though we removed the photo immediately and provided documentation about where the photo was obtained, they still sent collections after her. And the collections agency was calling the inn literally every hour during the day to harass her.
I paid the fee to get it cleared up, because it was my fault for providing the image. Since then, I’ve lost count of the hundreds of people coming my way and looking for advice having run into similar problems. Either they used a copyrighted photo unknowingly or their web developer provided a photo or in a couple of cases, multiple photos and they got nabbed for it.
Very recently, a related issue came up, and this topic reared its ugly head again, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit this.
A website that myself, one of my clients and about a dozen other commercial photographers had a written agreement with an association that in order to use our photos, there were to be photo credits with links back to our websites on the website itself and this was done prior.
The website recently got redone with the new web developer not transferring any photo credits for any of the photos.
I won’t detail the issues and communication that arose from this, but my photos and my client’s photos (which was my primary concern) were removed from the new site as this issue did not get resolved to our satisfaction.
Unfortunately, dozens of other photos remain that need to be credited to the other commercial photographers. If my client had caught this before I had, he would never have reached out and tried to get this resolved; he would have just sent them a cease and desist letter/copyright infringement notice plus tacking on usage fees.
I know some of the other photographers that contributed photos, and I suspect they would and may do the same. I did my due diligence and let both the site owners and web developers know about this, which has not yet been addressed looking at the site this morning.
What bothers me most about the recent issue is that one, the web developer not only failed to transfer the photo credits in the first place. If they were on the old site (which they were) that it should be common sense/a good legal move, to move them as well.
Two, the web developer did not even bother to check the provenance of the photos.
Three, and this is a little detail from above, when asked to give photo credit, added photo credits to photos that were not the photographers, leaving the photographers open to liability for copyright infringement themselves.
For businesses, the takeaways should be:
- Know where you got your site photos. Are they documented? Are they legal? If you have photos on your site that you have had for years, and you are not sure where they came from, it doesn’t mean your safe; it just means you might not have gotten caught yet. Sometimes it can take years for a copyright issue to come up.
- If a web developer provides photos, where is the provenance for them, and will they take responsibility (they should!) if a site they developed for you gets hit with a copyright infringement claim for an image or images they provided? If they refuse to when asked about this issue (and I’d get this in writing), you need to use your judgment about whether that’s someone you want to use as a vendor.
- If you switch web developers, keep in mind you need to either get provenance of any stock photos that the prior site developer has provided for you or replace them with new ones that you know are legal.
- if you buy stock photos from a stock photo site make sure you take a screenshot of the site with the page that photo is getting purchased from including the licensing information. Document, document, document. Sometimes photographers remove their photos from stock photo sites and then do image searches or unscrupulous firms do searches for them (unknown to the photographers). If you have proof it was bought legally, your in the clear.
- If you do source photos from free stock photo sites, include the URL of the page the photo came from and screenshot and date the screen of the page it came from. This won’t protect you from one of the big stock photo companies but may help if a private photographer claims copyright.
Here are a few sites where you can do a reverse image search on your images.
https://tineye.com/
https://www.labnol.org/reverse/
https://smallseotools.com/reverse-image-search/
by Heather T. | Dec 9, 2020 | Bed and Breakfasts, Blog, Marketing, Operations, Social Media
About 4 years ago I had written a blog post about Planning Ahead for Your Bed and Breakfast Promotions and this ties into the new calendar I’ve put together (below) and your content scheduling, or you can adapt or just use one format or another. Here is the online spreadsheet from that post (don’t forget you can download it and it does have multiple tabs). Tips on downloading or copying if needed near the bottom of the post.
At the beginning of this year with Covid hitting and B&Bs being closed or having a limited business, the big question was what to post, so I had designed this campaign with posting ideas https://betterwaytostay.com/campaign/. And the idea can still be used at any time.
I’ve had several questions from friends and other B&Bs if I was going to do the annual National and other Days of interest list that I do once a year compiled from a bunch of sources around the web. Since I had just finished next year’s calendar I am happy to share, but I also added some other tips (in the additional documents in the post) that might make posting and figuring out when to post for specials and other events (like Holidays) a bit clearer and hopefully easier.
It’s much easier to take about an hour at the beginning of the year, if not before, and develop at least a rough outline for your content calendar for the year and add to it (or subtract) as needed. Here are some content calendar ideas that I hope will help you start to develop a content calendar. The National Days is just a starter and I know every marketer under the sun pushes it, but it is admittedly a great “starting” point. I spent about 4 hours collating National, International Days and other Days of interest including as many food ones as I could find. This might be useful for restaurants as well looking for a few ideas to post. If you know of any I missed please let me know and I’ll add them in.
National and More Days for B&Bs (with some specific days as prompts)
National and More Days for B&Bs (no selections/prompts)
Calendar Example for a B&B. This is an example of a property going through the list and leaving the ones they might be interested in using for potential posts or blog or video posts. It doesn’t mean a property will do them, it just means a property found something interesting in the list, something that speaks to them (military family), a love of fun (Soylent Green Day or UFO Day for those with a sense of humor and love of Sci-fi), particular food days that resonate with things the B&B serves for breakfast, etc. Note this list is 11 pages pared down from 17.
Calendar Example for B&Bs with Specials. This is an example of preplanning your yearly calendar for posts and promotions that can be used stand-alone or in conjunction with the spreadsheet mentioned at the beginning of the blog. I only did the first couple of months but hopefully, you can get a good idea of how to go about adding information both for notes for yourself and scheduling posts for any ongoing specials or holidays you want to promote.
This is a PDF fillable calendar. (please download to fill) that you can fill in and print off or just print off and write in ideas (note please save it as a separate document or it may not save any inputted text). I would suggest making a checkmark next to the ones you’ve done, plus making any notes about engagement, likes, shares, and comments, these will help direct you in the following years if you want to do similar posts or promotions.
Content Calendar Sample Format. If you prefer a calendar type format instead of a spreadsheet or word document for figuring out your posting schedule you can use a format like this. There is no wrong way to do this, you find the format that works the best (and easiest) for you and go from there.
Blank Calendar-Sample Tracking. (I like to track likes, comments and shares on a seperate sheet, but you can also handwrite if that works for you (see below example). It helps if you note what you started with for each channel and ended with for each channel. Facebook January 1-352 Likes, January 31-386 Likes, etc. this will help you track progress and you can review quarterly to see whether what you are doing is actually working or not.
Content Calendar with Handwritten Notes *note circles mean a link to the inn’s website main or sub-page or blog post on the website.
Something some B&Bs don’t do is link to their website or a specific page on their website in posts at least once a week. If you are wondering about conversions and clicks from social media (and why you are not getting many or any) it’s something you need to look at.
I was talking to an innkeeper earlier this week and she was complaining that while her posts on Facebook were getting a lot of engagement, she had not gotten a single click through from Facebook in more than 3 months according to her Google Analytics. Not one of her over 100 posts had a link to the website in the post body itself. People tend to forget once someone has liked a page, the only link (unless you remind them in the posts that show up in their Facebook personal feed) to your website is back “on” the business page itself. People will not double click to search for the link.
This is How to make a copy or download a document (for reference if you want to use anything mentioned here offline or copied digitally)
I’d also recommend checking out You Need This 2021 Marketing Calendar [Free Templates] and his spreadsheet of helpful links and dates which does have things like the NHL Winter Classic, PGA Tournament of Champions, and the Grammy’s dates if these are things that you want to tie into your marketing but does not have the majority of the food dates that mine does. My calendar has most of the same information plus food but is missing sports and TV related events.
If you find any of the information above useful, we always appreciate a follow/like on our Facebook page (we don’t post a ton there as I personally prefer being able to chat with people but I am on FB pretty much all day during the week and your welcome to message me anytime) but would appreciate a page like and happy to reciprocate if you let us know your business page link, or you can connect on Linkedin or Twitter or just come say hello .
If you know someone that can use some social media help and would like to be able to learn it and manage it themselves (that’s what we do, we teach it) instead of paying an external company to manage it, please give me a call (860-326-0721) or email me, we are happy to help. Cheers and Happy Holidays. Please stay safe out there!
