Yes.

Let me explain.

We are all naturally drawn to the faces of others. There’s a reason it’s used so often in advertising. If  you’re an entrepreneur and you are your company, or at least the main representative of it, putting your face on your marketing is going to have several benefits.

If you are marketing locally, you are increasing the chances that people will recognize you, even if they’ve only met you once for 30 seconds. If you interact with them online and your photo is on your profile, they’ll be much more comfortable and open talking with you than they otherwise might be.

This is the same thing marketing people do every day with brands – building familiarity and trust by staying in front of their market.

Your photo should be up to date and represent your personality. Smile! Look directly at the camera. How would you want to look if someone were standing in front of you, about to shake your hand when you meet them for the first time?  The same ideas apply.

There is a fabulous post related to this with examples of eye tracking heat maps on a marketing page showing what the impact of a face in marketing can have on James Breeze’s blog. I highly recommend reading it.

WordPress is the most widely used platform for blogging that exists today. Many companies use it as a Content Management System (CMS) for non-blogging websites.

Like most things, there are some precautions to take – especially if you are a small business operating on a limited budget yet still wanting to customize options in WordPress.

If you’re buying (or downloading a free) WordPress theme, be sure it’s supported and check their documentation. If that is out of date, then there may be security issues with the theme itself.

Remember that the more fun options able to be edited through the WordPress admin, the more code you may be adding to your site. Some themes like this are wonderful, cleanly-coded marvels.   However, some are a hot mess of code that will do more harm than good for your site. It’s worth getting a 30 minute consult from someone who can tell the difference to help you find the right theme.

Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Professional

If you do have a small budget and can hire someone to do some simple customizing and setup, they should be able to answer several questions:

Will this theme use native WordPress features for the navigation menu and widgets (sidebars/footer)?

What plug-ins will be installed?

What does each plug-in do?

How is each plug-in rated?

Will you show me how to update my menu, widgets, blog posts and pages?

Get Several Quotes

Finally, I strongly encourage everyone to talk to 3 or 4 website designers before hiring help and ask them the questions above. Don’t just go with the lowest price, but with the one who will make it possible for you to update things on your own and who thoroughly understands how to work within WordPress.

When you don’t understand a lot of the technology, it can be difficult to find the right person to hire. I’ve worked with many clients who hired someone they liked or were recommended to, only to have problems that end up costing thousands of dollars to correct. Doing a little research into how things work up front will save you time and money in the long run.

If you’re a small business owner, you understand the importance of support. It comes from lots of places, from our families, clients, friends and sometimes from complete strangers. This post is going to focus on one of the major places I get support, and that’s from my business girlfriends. Women who understand my ups and downs because they face them too.

These ladies have been there when things were slow, when problems seemed insurmountable, and lately, we’ve been celebrating victories. They all started off as strangers that I met at networking events, then became business partners, and I now consider them to be friends.

I’m posting them in alphabetical order.  :-)

Mary Beth Dunn

Laura Flowers

Darla LeDoux

Debbie McCurry

Nikki Means

Crystal Theis

Karla Zachman

Ladies, thanks a million and I look forward to lots more laughs and brilliant ideas for all of our businesses!

Domain names are the cheapest part of building a new website. At $10-$15 per year, it’s common for businesses and website developers to have quite a few.

My advice on domain names is to setup an account yourself and buy your domain name. Most website development companies are happy to do this for you, but if you switch developers or hosting companies you are going to be glad you’ve got that integral part of your online presence available to you in your own account. The last thing you want is to have to change domain names on all of your marketing material and online profiles at various sites because your developer has disappeared. Sad to say, this does happen. It is possible to recover a domain name in this situation, but it takes time.

My recommendation- go to DomainIt, which is a local domain registrar in Cincinnati, and register your domain names on your own. It’s easy and inexpensive, and could save you a lot of grief later on!