Business ethics are one of those topics that receives much discussion, but sadly, not always enough action. In your own business, taking action on maintaining ethical business practices is essential. It may be the difference between running a successful business, and joining the legion of failed companies, watching regretfully from the sidelines.

Instead of merely talking about business ethics, it's time to do something about them. While perhaps not as glamourous as discussions of sales, marketing, public relations, and personnel management, honesty is equally as important. In fact, ethics could be even more important as the level of honesty you and your company display is reflected in every aspect of your business. Good faith builds companies. Bad faith can destroy firms even more quickly.

Almost every business has a mission statement, worded more or less, very vaguely and in general terms. Seldom are business ethics part of that mission statement, except as part of overall customer service. While good customer service is part of maintaining an ethical business, they are only part of the whole picture. The philosopy of ethical business must permeate the entire company and encompass every business activity. That blanket coverage includes internal and external business relationships.



For most business people, ethical business practices start and end with customer service. Let's start there ourselves. Clearly, the treatment of customers, in either a good or bad manner, is the most prominent application of business ethics. If customers are lied to, made promises the business has no intention to keep, or charged for products or services vastly inferior to the initial agreement, those costomers will leave.

Not only will the former clients stop patronizing your business, they will tell everyone they know about their bad experiences. Word of mouth advertising and viral marketing are trusted by other people. When someone has a great experience with a business, they tell their friends and family. When the business reneges on their side of the bargain, that information is shared as well. Not only are stories about a firm's less than honest business pactices spread more often than good news, that same bad news travels faster than the speed of light.

The sound you don't hear is your former customers, voting with their feet, over to your competitors. To make matters worse, those one time clients are taking potential new business with them. The damage to your bottom line is difficult to quantify. Suffice it to say that you'll feel the pain.

Sales and marketing are other areas where ethics are very important, to the point of being crucial. Don't be fooled into thinking that misleading advertising and sales claims will help boost your company revenues. It may be true that a small uptick in gross income could really take place. The problem is the gains are an illusion at best, and very short lived. At the same time, you know that you have tried to trick your clients and customers. That's not something I would want to live with. Would you?



If your company conducts research, and it should, make certain that the results are honest and not distorted to make them fit a preferred outcome. Whether market research, or painstaking scientific study, all research should be done openly and honestly. This is especially true if your results are for publication. Falsifying test results that endanger other people using your company products and services is unforgivable. Keep all of your research honest for everyone's sake.

Business ethics are not something that can be treated in a cavalier fashion, and then discarded. If you truly believe your company has a role to play in the development of the economy, and in the enhancement of people's lives, ethical business practices must become a way of life for your firm.

Make certain that everyone in your organization, from top to bottom, shares the ethical vision.

Your customers, your employees, and your own conscience, will thank you for it.

Tags: business ethics, research, marketing, customer service.

READ MORE - Business ethics: Don't compromise your principles

Entrepreneurs are an independent lot. That's why they took the risk of going into business for themselves. Along with that fiercely independent nature is a reluctance to ask advice from others. That reluctance is often especially true of seeking new business ideas from members of the company staff. This can be a very dangerous policy for business owners, especially when the company is poised for growth and expansion.

Asking the staff for ideas is one of the most powerful business growth techniques available. After all, who better to know your suppliers, your customers and clients, the media, and the day to day operations, than the people doing the work. The organization's own staff work in the business on a daily basis. They know where money can be saved, where sales can be expanded, and where a better image of the company can be built. All the business owner has to do is ask.

Of course, seeking the advice of the employees is often easier said than done. Asking for help is often viewed by business owners as weakness and a threat to their position. Fortunately for those entrepreneurs, there are some ways to request ideas without needless worries about losing control or authority. In fact, working with the members of the staff will go far toward increasing their level of respect for the company owner. People will give respect when it's offered to them in return.



A good place to start is to hold a series of individual staff meetings. Don't worry about time being wasted here. The results will make up any work shortfalls many times over. During the meeting, ask each employee what they do each day. Don't let them quote the job description. What you want is a list of daily activities. Find out which activities can be removed and which ones could expanded to be more effective.

After the activities have been covered and discussed, ask where the person believes changes could be made that would make their job more productive. Be careful that the ideas presented aren't about reducing the workload. What you are seeking are time and money savers that make the employee more effective. You may find that many of the daily tasks are indeed redundant or wasteful. If so, those duties can be removed, and replaced with ideas from the staff person. If the discussion has been conducted openly and honestly on the part of the owner, the employee will respond in kind.

Once the individual job duties are discussed and streamlined into greater efficiency of time management, it's time to move on to larger meetings. The purpose of these discussions is for everyone to brainstorm new ideas and creative solutions to the problems of growth and expansion. After all, you are seeking cost effective and productive ideas. Avoiding the obvious and expensive fallback routes of hiring more staff or spending more money than necessary are two of the goals. Getting your existing organization onboard with the new growth direction is another.



As ideas are formulated and discussed, the staff displays a number of other traits as well. Along with generating new ways of doing things and increasing revenue, the employees bond closer together as a unit. Sharing thoughts together in an open forum, where everyone is treated equally, and where their input is given equal weight, is empowering. Empowered employees will work harder to achieving the company goals because they had a hand in formulating them. They take ownership of the idea and run with it.

At the same time, mutual respect is built between the employer and the employee. Instead of the initial fears of loss of respect, the opposite is the end result. People receiving respect and recognition for their efforts will return it. Morale goes up. So do revenues.

Ask your employees for their ideas and input. They will appreciate the gesture and be more effective and happier people as well. Instead of being considered as expendable workers, they will consider themselves partners in the company's success. As such, they will do everything possible to achieve the goals that are set. After all, they helped to create them.

Morale goes up. Company revenues rise as well.

Talk about a win win situation for everyone involved.

Tags: business ideas, entrepreneurs, brainstorming, employee empowerment.

READ MORE - Business growth: Empower your staff

Organic SEO is one of the latest in search engine optimization buzzwords. It might be a fashionable phrase in SEO circles, but the concept is as old (if you can call it that) as the internet itself. To use another SEO buzzword, we're talking link bait. In essence, it's all about the web page's content, and how it attracts natural inbound links.

Ah, now I've gone and spoiled some perfectly good SEO jargon for you. By the way, if you're like me, your preference is to take those obscuring technical terms, and turn their purposely hidden concepts, into easily understandable ideas. I like to take the fun out of the obscurity crowd. Spoiling a party that's for just the cool kids is fun, in an off centre kind of way.

Anyway, back to organic search, and content, and links, and all that good stuff.

In the early days of the internet, not many people worried about search engine rankings all that much. The now ubiquitous Google was still years away from your desktop search yearnings. For the old schoolers, the way to get noticed was by surfing the net from site to site. The ties that bound those websites together were links.

If a site offered interesting and informative content, another website owner would create a link to the page. While seemingly an old and slightly rusty concept at first glance, the modern form of organic SEO was born. It's still with us today all dressed up in new clothes as link bait. It's still the same old thing in a new jargon coated wrapper.



Search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, and Ask reward good content that attracts one way inbound links. It has always been that way. The only changes have been in the levels of emphasis.

Currently, the best inbound links are one way links, from traditional sites and blogs, that share the same theme as your blog. In other words, your blog about elephants will benefit more from a link from another elephant blog, than with a link from a blog about carrots. That's not to say that the carrot blog link won't provide some earch engine ranking push. The value received simply won't match the benefit from the theme related elephant blog link. That was easy, now wasn't it?

For gaining those coveted theme related incoming links, you must provide interesting and informative content. That's what is meant by the trendy term of link bait. Think of a great post as a fishing lure out to catch the big one. If you thrown an old boot over the side of your boat, you might catch a fish after several weeks. Use the correct bait, and the fish will bite all day long, providing you with plenty of dinner. It's like that with blog posts. No one is going to link to anything that's of no value to anyone.



To get even more benefit from your blog posts, place a keyword phrase in the title. Since the title of the post is often quoted, those keywords will appear on the clickable link line of the inbound link over at the sending blog. Search engines like that sort of thing. Be sure to use the same keywords a few times in your post as well. For organic SEO, it's very helpful in classification of the content for the benefit of the search engines. It lines things up nice and pretty for their computer ranking calculations. You don't want to disappoint them.

You also make things handier and easier to understand for your readers. After all, the best link bait for organic SEO purposes, is to provide posts that people will actually want to read and recommend to others. The recommendation of your blog arrives in the form of one way inbound links. Bloggers are free and generous linkers, who link happily to their favourite posts. For organic SEO, that blog spirit of information sharing, reminiscent of the early internet days, places blogs several steps ahead in the search engine rankings.

Everything that's old is new again.

Providing great blog posting content as link bait makes organic SEO a natural outcome of your blogging efforts. Organic SEO power is yet one more great reason to start and maintain a business blog.

There you have it: technical SEO jargon made simple.

Now you can rest easy.

Tags: organic SEO, search engines, link bait, inbound links.

READ MORE - Organic SEO: Blogs cast the link bait

Have you ever had problems explaining an abstract concept to someone in your business or personal life?

Perhaps you were attempting to sell an intangible product or explaining a technique for achieving a personal goal. To your dismay, the person receiving the information was just not getting the point somehow. The explanation you provided made no sense to them.

Enter the analogy.

You have heard of analogies, right? They are a way of comparing an unfamiliar abstract idea with an already known mental image. It's like painting a picture in the listener's mind. That's of course an analogy too, as you may have guessed. I happen to like making analogies; and for more reasons than just explanations.

Analogies are very important in sales and marketing situations. The item or service being offered to the prospect may not fit into their existing knowledge base. The product or service might be entirely new to them. As such, the prospect needs a familiar frame of reference, from which to make the final buying decision.



Let's take a real life situation.

This morning, I was discussing SEO with a client who was somewhat new to search engines and search engine optimization. Instead of discussing abstract and completely unfamiliar terms such as title tags, keyword phrases, and alt attributes, to name only a few, I used an analogy.

I described SEO as moving furniture into an empty house. The vacant home represented the website as it exists now. Unloaded into the house is the moving van full of furniture and other household items. As with moving house, the heavy lifting has to be completed before you can do anything else. Once the furniture is in the new premises, then curtains, fancy bedspreads, and fine china and silverware can be added. The initial placement is good, but you think that you can make the home even nicer with some changes.

Of course, after examining the results, it's decided that the sofa would be better suited to another wall, and the kitchen table would be best on the other side of the room. After a number of changes in layout and additions, the final result is much better than before. So too with SEO. As with setting up your home in the best possible manner, SEO takes some experimentation and testing as well.



Sales and marketing aren't the only way that analogies can be used to aid your business success. Making connections, between seemingly unrelated things, helps to find creative solutions to everyday and long term business problems as well.

What the utilization of analogies and comparisons does is to change the frame of reference and to force thinking in new and interesting ways. If a person is only thinking of the problem in its own terms, the number of possible solutions is very limited. By making analogies, and forced comparisons, the opportunities for new and creative solutions is multiplied many times over.

Use some analogies in your business and everyday life. Not only will your potential and current customers and clients understand your products and services better, so will you. By making comparisons and connections between your business and another known framework, the possibilities for creative thought and ideas increase exponentially.

Let an analogy go to work for you and your business today.

Tags: analogies, creative thinking, sales and marketing, SEO.

READ MORE - Analogies: Making the connection

The 180^th edition of the longest running internet blog carnival, the well known Carnival of the Vanities appears at the political and cigar blog known as The Cigar Intelligence Agency.

Carnival of the Vanities is the original collection of blog postings, assembling some of the best and wide ranging bloggers on the internet.

This week's Carnival of the Vanities entries include politics, literature, science, medicine, technology, business, and culture.



I have an entry in this week's Carnival of the Vanities as well.

My post is titled "Blog evolution: Managing change in blog focus" where I discuss how logs evolve over time. They change even when we aren't thinking they are changing in any way. The movement toward a different blog focus may also take place by design. In either case, the focus of your blog may be entirely different from its initial goals. That is not necessarily a bad thing.




To participate in the Carnival of the Vanities, or any of the other blog carnivals, one of the easiest techniques is to use the all inclusive carnival entry form at The Conservative Cat.





Another participation option is to simply e-mail your entry to the new e-mail address:

cotvmail -at- gmail -dot- com

As I suggest elsewhere, hosting and contributing to the various internet blog carnivals is a great promotional idea for your blog.

Next week's edition of Carnival of the Vanities appears at Daniel M. Harrison's political, media, and technology blog known as The Global Perspective.

In the meantime, head on over to the The Cigar Intelligence Agency hosting of Carnival of the Vanities and enjoy the posts on offer.

You will almost certainly be introduced to some great new and interesting blogs.

Tags: Carnival of the Vanities, blogging, carnivals, promotions.

READ MORE - Carnival of the Vanities at The Cigar Intelligence Agency