I’ll admit, I’ve gotten lucky with my own small business and I’m booked solid with clients and projects. The downside is that I find myself turning down a lot of requests from other small business owners. So, this blog post is for them - for those small business owners, nonprofits and solo healthcare providers who might be able to do some of their own marketing work. Hopefully it’s helpful advice and my own recommendations for tools and tips that I’ve learned throughout the past 15+ years consulting with other small business owners  and nonprofits. 
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Put One Foot in Front of the Other.
In the words of Kris Kringle advising the Warlock, just get started walking forward. Commit to doing one thing to help your business each week or each month - whether it’s writing a blog post (see what I did there), organizing your email contacts, or crafting your own social media posts regularly, you can start the ball rolling on your own marketing.

Improve Your Website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

​SEO is simply the art of improving your rankings with websites like Google. We don’t know the secret recipe to Google’s algorithm but we can play their game and set websites up for success by doing the basics.

Eight days into the new year and many are just returning to work and wondering what 2018 will bring for their small business. As a small business consultant, Lamb Consulting sees a wide range of people running their own company but a few things cross all industries as ways nearly everyone can work to begin their new year on a better note. 

1. Update Your Email Lists
For many small business owners, this one falls by the wayside because they feel they are the only ones who know all their clients and industry colleagues. If that sounds familiar, there's no better time than January in a new year to get your email contact lists updated and organized. Referrals will always be your top driver of new business so why put this one off any longer? If using a mail service like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, make it easy on yourself and simply begin by making sure all your contacts there have a first name so you can personalize your emails. Once that's done, work on segmenting your lists into Groups so you can further customize messages. One group could be labeled clients, customers or patients while another could be sectioned off as friends/family. Trust me on this one - it's worth the time.

2. Backup Everything
If you remember Y2K, this is a no-brainer. Every New Year's is an opportunity to remember to backup your files, photos, data, email lists and your website. Dropbox is a great tool (free for the first 2 gigs of space) backing up on the cloud so you can access data from other devices but I'd also suggest a physical, external backup device. For my clients, I download and backup their websites every year - easy to do if you're using Weebly or another web service that doesn't charge extra for such services.