We talk about using content marketing and inbound marketing as a core Tech Smart Boss strategy. Done properly, this leaves you with a lot of great content, known as evergreen content, that you can share over and over again. You can also repurpose it (and you should) for your sales team. In this episode, I discuss the concept of reusing your content…

Sadly there are only 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and not even a Tech Smart Boss can do anything about that. But guess what, that is plenty of time. The key is to work smarter, not harder, so there's no excuse for not having time to get stuff done. One method that I use is called Time Blocking and it can help you clear out all the distractions and…

Trying to participate in social media these days is like trying to drink water out a fire hydrant. Everyone's doing it and for the few people out there actually trying to listen, you have a million people screaming "Hey, look at me!" So if you're going to do it, you don't want to do it alone, you need to bring your entire crew with you, and in busi…

I just went through the nightmare scenario we all dread, my laptop got completely wiped. Everything gone, brand new OS installed, all data gone. But being a Tech Smart Boss, I was able to get my entire workspace back up and running, without losing anything, in less than a day (and now my laptop is working better than ever). In this episode, I go th…

I talk about being customer-centric all the time and frequently complain when I deal with companies that don't have the same approach to customer service that I believe should be delivered. But I've never gone into a step by step on how to become a customer-centric organization. It's like common sense, it's not so common until someone explains it t…

There are lots of ways to give poor customer support, and one way, to send a canned response to your lead or customer the wrong way. And yes, there is a right way. Leveraging canned responses is a key business process that you need to implement in your business, but done incorrectly and you could be ruining your brand. In this episode, I go over th…

You've probably heard the saying "It's cheaper to keep em" in reference to marriage, guess what it applies to employees as well (but only the really good ones, you have to let the bad ones go fast or they can cost you quite a bit). Seriously though, one of the best signs of a mature and profitable company is the retention rate. And in many cases, i…

When you're hanging out at a social engagement, we all see the same types of people. There are those who talk about nothing but themselves. Those that make boring small talk about the weather and other topics we don't care about. And then there's that person that tells stories, talks about engaging stuff you've never heard of before, and everyone j…

We talk a lot about project management technology (and we mention a bunch in this episode), but we never talk about perhaps the most important part of successfully managing projects, the project manager! And over the many years of managing and hiring project managers, this is probably the area where I have made my best hires, so I feel confident in…

The human brain is hard-wired to relate to stories. And what makes a billion dollar movie like Avengers: Endgame succeed is sticking to a tried and proven storytelling method. The same process of telling a story that helps Hollywood be successful can also be applied to your business, even a small business. In your content and marketing, you can bui…

Why prune a bush? To encourage healthier growth and rejuvenate it. It's a common thing we do to take care of our yard but it's something we rarely think about when it comes to the content on our blog. In fact, content pruning is a necessary thing, and it involves not just getting rid of old content, but in many cases, making old content better so i…

A Tech Smart Boss is always trying to drive more traffic, drive more leads, and drive more sales. But sometimes, the easy place to mine for new gold is to clean up all the gold you dropped and left behind. OK, we're not talking about gold, we're talking about digital gold, website visitors who give you their email information so you can nurture the…

We're all about productivity and getting stuff done as a Tech Smart Boss. Finding that perfect blend of great business process and do it yourself technology to grow your business is what we're all about. To that extent, I'm a big believer that as a small business, you must embrace your strengths, and part of that is being more agile and nimble than…

We talk a lot about content marketing, inbound marketing, lead magnets, search engine optimization, and all the things that enable you to drive leads from your website straight into your sales queue. But we've never gone deep into one of the most important pieces of the puzzle, your landing page. Without a successful landing page, you can drive all…

If you listen to the podcast, you know there are 2 things I am really passionate about, great customer support and metrics. Not just any metrics, but metrics you can use to make a difference in your business. So you know I was excited to combine both topics in the same episode. In this episode, I go over 9 customer support metrics that you should m…

You may not know it, but odds are that you are using the Kanban project management methodology every day. In all areas of your business; sales, marketing, operations, development, and even in your own personal task management. It's a pretty simple concept, but when you combine the ability to have attributes like stages, priorities, assignees, time …

It's been a while since I did a tech stack podcast, so since I've been using some new tools in my sales toolkit, I wanted to do a refresh episode. As with anything, a tech stack depends greatly on the type of business you're in. And in this case, what you're selling. I go over a tech stack that perfect for teams that sell products or services in pr…

We talk a lot about providing excellent customer support on the Tech Smart Boss podcast. It's something that should just be the standard for business, but unfortunately, for most organizations, they fall short. In this episode, I go over 8 things that you should be doing from a technology and process perspective to deliver great customer support.…

A Tech Smart Boss believes in testing all things. Not just to find out what works, but what doesn't. This applies to our websites as well, but doing A/B testing can require a Ph.D. in mathematics if you do it the way some want you to. As a small business, you probably don't have the traffic to do highly scientific A/B testing and in general, your o…

Case studies are excellent mid and bottom of the funnel evergreen content. Your potential customers may be ready to buy your product or service, they just need a little extra justification to pull the trigger. Seeing a case study that resonates with them can close the deal. But depending on your industry, it may be difficult to get customers to agr…

We always talk about Content Marketing on the podcast and how it's typically going to be the best ROI for any bootstrapped business in terms of getting qualified leads. However, Content Marketing takes time, and to do it correctly takes even more time. And time is not something that a Tech Smart Boss has a lot of. So unless you just love to write, …

Some of your best customer and lead information flows through your support organization, but that valuable intel never reaches your sales team, to help them do their job better. Things such as feedback on competitor products, what they like and don't like about your product or service, key personnel changes in the users of your product and service …

One of the signals that Google uses to rank web pages is how long a person stays on that page before popping back into Google to search for the same thing. It's a metric called "Dwell Time." It's an important thing to increase on your website content, not just for Google, but to keep people on your site in general with the goal of converting them i…

As humans we all have cognitive biases. Many were developed to help us survive way back in the cave man days, but can be quite destructive for an entrepreneur. In this episode, I discuss 7 cognitive biases that I have researched and identified in myself over the past 19 years of being an entrepreneur. And I discuss the importance of counteracting y…

Anyone with kids can appreciate the effectiveness of asking why over and over again until the response is "Because I said so" or "Because God made it that way." Well in business, it turns out asking why 5 times, leads to a great root cause analysis method. And it applies to more than just troubleshooting manufacturing issues at a Toyota robotics pl…

I've been talking a lot of about content and inbound marketing and how important search engine optimization or SEO is. It's one thing to have great content, but you also have to make sure you're putting your best foot forward with the search engines, to get them to recommend your content to their user and their search queries. In Episode 108, I tal…

We talk a lot about the sales funnel on the Tech Smart Boss podcast. As we said on Episode 35, your website should be a lead generating engine for your business. And part of that lead generation is to take your buyer through a journey. They start in the top of the funnel, or awareness stage. Just learning about your industry or putting names to the…

I always talk about how important it is to write great content as part of a inbound marketing strategy. You want to write content that answers questions that people are asking so that search engines like Google can send them your way. But an equally important part of the equation, is to structure your content so that you send the right signals to G…

Over the past 2 years I've made a complete reversal on the adoption of Chatbots. Back in Episode 49 of the podcast, I was all for Live Chat. And recently, in Episode 97, I went full blown Skynet, and sang the praises of the Chat Bot. But I never really gave a full explanation of why I went the chat bot route and I also don't want to leave the impre…

Over the past 2 years, I've talked on the podcast a lot about content marketing, segmentation, customer personas, email deliverability, and automation. But I've never pulled it all together into an actionable task list of how to set up an email marketing automation too to bring it all together, until this episode. I just recently switched my email …

I haven't always been a fan of social proof widgets on a website, in fact, I'm a recent convert to the concept. In this episode, I discuss why I didn't like them and what changed my mind. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that they are a nice addition to your website to generate desired activities and conversions by your website visitors. This c…

Everyone these days seem to want, even demand, a work from home position. And I've talked in the past about my company, as well as many others, are 100% remote work companies. There are pros and cons to remote work, and I cover some of those in this episode, but if you are working remotely the majority of your time, there are some things you can do…

It's hard to believe it's the end of the year already. It seems like just yesterday we were talking about planning for 2018, and now 2019 is basically about to steam roll us. More than just planning for the new year, there are a lot of key things an entrepreneur should be doing to wrap up a year. Some are routine things that we just have to prepare…

It's so easy when you're hiring your first (or 100th) employee just to do a quick Internet search and grab a job offer letter template and quickly hit the send button. But if you do that, you're missing a real opportunity to set the right impression for your potential hire, and in a competitive environment, you may just be losing out on the hire. T…

In this episode, we continue with part 2 of your questions as part of our 100th episode, ask me anything. We wrap up 5 more questions submitted by our listeners and talk about topics that I hope will provide value to all Tech Smart Bosses. Enjoy and thanks for supporting us on our first 100 episodes (and now 101)! https://www.techsmartboss.com/101…

It's hard to believe it's been 100 episodes of the Tech Smart Boss podcast. I'm just impressed I have stuck with it and had enough stuff to talk about for 100 episodes. More impressive (to me) is the feedback that I've gotten from the small community that has been built. Listeners from all over the world who have reached out to me on email, Faceboo…

One common trait of Tech Smart Bosses is that tend to support remote teams. I mean who wants to pay a bunch of rent to an expensive office space these days, plus, we're always looking to hire the best team, not just the best local team. We also rely heavily on part-time, freelancers, fractional staff and without realizing it, our remote and part-ti…

Blockchain has been in the news a lot the past year or so, especially with the rise (and fall and rise and fall) of Bitcoin. But blockchain is much more than just cryptocurrency. More and more you hear that blockchain is the future and going to be a very disruptive force in business. The question is, the future of what? What the heck is a blockchai…

I've been talking about chatbots for over a year, but I've never really taken them serious. Well, I've changed my mind and I'm jumping in the deep end of the pool with chatbots (I hope they are waterproof and doing this doesn't electrocute me). I still feel that chatbots are to be feared in the mid-term future, when they start to really disrupt job…

Content Marketing is changing and if you're not on top of the changes you will become as obsolete as an Apple Adapter when they release the next iPhone 😂. Just writing good content unfortunately is not good enough anymore. Everyone is doing it and the search engines that used to be promoting you are now competing against you. But there are ways to …

In Episode 60 of the podcast (https://www.techsmartboss.com/60), I talked about how to use key performance indicators and metrics as levers in your business. One of the things I cautioned about was spending a lot of time tracking vanity metrics. If you are serious about email marketing, and it is a proven sales channel for your business, there are …

There are a lot of podcasts out there, hopefully you find the Tech Smart Boss podcast as one of the better ones (I mean at least put me on the right side of the bell curve). One question that I get a lot is how to start a podcast. There's a belief that you have to be a real techie combined with some magic. But it's not really that tough and unless …

There's a lot of bad websites on the Internet. And I'm not just talking about design (although that's a big reason). I'm talking about websites that are not delivering for the businesses that they belong to. Not delivering leads, not delivering credibility, not delivering value to the customers and potential customers who visit them. In this episod…

Many entrepreneurs focus so much on top-line growth (increasing sales revenue) that they fail to miss a major factor in long-term success, keeping gripes on the bottom line (expenses). Unless you are Uber, you really need to manage your business expenses tightly. Cash(flow) rules everything around me (C.R.E.A.M.) is the bootstrapped entrepreneurs m…

These days hacks are so frequent, anything that happens, even unintentional bad judgment tweets, is just explained by, "Oh I was hacked." But when it comes to your business and your brand, it's not that simple. A hack can end you or critically injure your business. And in many cases, it's not just an outside hacker that is looking to do you damage,…

Just like anything in life, there are some good lead magnets and there are some bad lead magnets. A good lead magnet is one that produces... leads. Good lead magnets require some upfront planning and in this episode, I got over 6 key things you must do in order to create good, converting lead magnets. https://www.techsmartboss.com/90…

Some of the keys to being a great entrepreneur (other than being a Tech savvy, Tech Smart Boss) is having a great decision-making process, building a culture where everyone's opinion matters, and always questioning assumptions. A great way to accomplish all of these is being very adept at using the SWOT process. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesse…

Getting feedback from your customers and leads are critical to improving your business. But everybody is busy these days, so no one has time for your long boring survey asking a million questions. You have to be strategic, and use the latest survey technology and techniques, and then have a plan for how you want to use the information you lean. In …

Sometimes we focus so much on customer acquisition, we miss the low hanging fruit of ensuring the customers we win have an amazing experience and transition to ambassadors for our product or service. Even worse, if you offer a trial of your software and hope to convert them to paying customers, messing up on your onboarding can create a big leak in…

Artificial Intelligence is something we see a lot in sci-fi movies about the benefits and most of the time, the dangers, of the future when AI becomes a reality, takes over, and kills all humans. Well, the truth is, artificial intelligence is not just something in the future, but it's the present and it's already a real impact to our businesses and…