Google+ Adds New Local Listings Tab for Businesses

Google's fast-growing, if only still nascent, social network Google+ has rolled out a new tab dedicated to providing information on local businesses. Located on the right-hand side of the Google+ page, Google+ Local allows users to search for businesses that are nearby, read reviews and find them using Google Maps.

For instance, if you search for "cheeseburgers" on Google+ Local, it will generate a list of restaurants near your location that serve cheeseburgers. If you click on one of the listings, you'll be taken to a local Google+ page that includes photos, reviews from people in your Google+ Circles and other information such as address and opening hours from the company's Google Places for Business listing.

For business owners, this means that a company's information on its Google Places for Business listing will now be available to users across Google search, maps, mobile and now Google+. It can be even more important now for business owners to verify their basic listing data, make updates, add photos and respond to customer reviews.

Related: What You Need to Know About the New Google+ Design 

Additionally, Google has integrated a business's Zagat score into its Google+ Local listings. Google purchased the popular business survey rating service last fall for more than $150 million.

"For example, a restaurant that has great food but not great decor might be 4 stars, but with Zagat you'd see a [score of] 26 in Food and an 8 in Decor, and know that it might not be the best place for date night," Google product management director Avni Shah wrote in a blog post announcing the Google+ Local launch.

The search giant also hinted that it will be further integrating Google+ business pages and Google+ Local listings.

"We know many of you have already created a Google+ Page for your business, and have been hosting hangouts and sharing photos, videos and posts," Jen Fitzpatrick, Google's vice president of engineering, wrote in a separate blog post. "We're excited that we'll soon extend these social experiences to more Google+ Local pages in the weeks and months ahead."

Related: Chris Brogan on How Businesses Benefit from Google+ (Video)

Did you find this story helpful? YesNo Thanks for making Entrepreneur better for everyone. Jason Fell is technology editor of Entrepreneur.com. 

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Tech Tools for Keeping a Digital Eye on Employees

From protecting your company from theft to ensuring your workplace is free of harassment, there are many reasons business owners might want to monitor the digital footprints of their employees. But doing it right -- legally and ethically -- should be a top priority.

Technology can support policies to ensure appropriate use of your assets and protect your business. Here are several tools to consider.

Create a technology policy: Get help crafting a technology-use policy with online tools such as the customizable forms offered by the ePolicy Institute. The firm's form kit ($99 one-time fee) can help you outline your rules for using and tracking email and instant messaging, Web surfing and blogging and software downloading on company devices. It also offers a template for creating social media policies ($49). Make sure your policies also cover employees' use of their own devices while at work and when accessing company data.

Tracking use of computers and smartphones: A slew of products are available for tracking activity on company devices. Be sure to use reputable, reliable and secure software, and avoid anything smacking of spyware or malware.

SpectorSoft makes products that can record everything that occurs on company devices and provide reports about suspect activity (from $99 for one basic license to $2,875 for a 25-person office). Administrators can direct the software to monitor specific people and give particular managers the right to set policy and review collected data, all of which is encrypted while moving across your systems and when sitting in storage.

Monitoring social media usage: An array of companies has emerged that aim to help companies monitor employee activity on blogs and sites including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and to enforce their policies. For instance, SocialLogix can assess the level of social media use -- or abuse -- at your company (one-time fee starting at $2,000), uncover what employees are doing and saying, and alert you to potential problems (about $10 per user per month).

Other companies that monitor social media activity include Actiance and Socialware.

Blocking websites: Many companies use secure Web gateways or Web filters to monitor employee use of the Web, block malware-laced sites and keep employees from accessing sites in categories of concern -- from news to porn to gambling.

Among the most popular providers of such tools is Websense (about $50 per user). Other well-regarded providers include Blue Coat Systems and McAfee. Some monitoring programs also offer Web filtering.

Which tools do you use to keep an eye on what goes on in your office? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Riva Richmond is a freelance journalist who has covered technology for more than 10 years. She writes regularly on electronic security and privacy for The New York Times and its Gadgetwise and Bits blogs. She has also written extensively about small business for The Wall Street Journal and was previously a technology reporter at Dow Jones Newswires.

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Guy Kawasaki: No 'Secret Sauce' for Tech Success

Secrets of the Tech Elite is brought to you by HP EliteBook

Mobile apps. Social media tools. Newfangled gadgets. You name it and someone's building or engineering it.

With an increasingly low barrier to entry and the potential for big money, the idea of starting a company in the technology business can be tempting -- or daunting. With so much potential for wild success or utter failure, what's an aspiring entrepreneur to do?

We asked Guy Kawasaki, a co-founder of Alltop, a managing director at VC firm Garage Technology Ventures, author and former chief evangelist at Apple. In an email interview, we discussed what's helped him succeed in the tech business and how others can find their own success.

What follows is an edited version of our exchange:

Related: Three Lessons a Serial Tech Entrepreneur Learned from Bill Gates 

Entrepreneur: Looking back, what was the one thing that helped the most in breaking through in the highly competitive technology business?
Kawasaki: Nepotism. My college roommate hired me. There's a lesson here, though: It doesn't matter how you get your job. What matters is what you do with the opportunity.

Entrepreneur: What's the secret sauce to being successful in tech today?
Kawasaki: There is only hard work and luck which are really two sides of the same coin. The search for a secret sauce is a futile waste of time. Create something, sell it, make it better, sell it some more and then create something that obsoletes what you used to make.

Entrepreneur: Who is your tech hero?
Kawasaki: There are people I admire such as Steve Wozniak, but I don't "worship" anyone. If you have to put someone on a pedestal, put teachers. They are society's heroes.

Entrepreneur: When did you know you'd made the leap from small-time to big-time? What changed?
Kawasaki: I don't consider myself "big time." I merely consider myself a father, and one role of a father is to provide financial resources for his family. My writing, speaking, advising and investing are all means to this end. 

Entrepreneur: What helps you stay ahead of the game in tech?
Kawasaki: I'm not sure that I am ahead of the game. I do have a peripatetic and active intellectual curiosity. If nothing else, that's good for finding stuff to post on Google+ and Facebook.

Entrepreneur: What’s your best advice for entrepreneurs looking to succeed in tech?
Kawasaki: Create a prototype and get it to market as soon as you can. Ignore the naysayers. Revise fast.

Related: Mark Cuban's 12 Rules for Startups

Did you find this story helpful? YesNo Thanks for making Entrepreneur better for everyone. Jason Fell is technology editor of Entrepreneur.com. 

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What Facebook's IPO Debacle Means for Startup Funding

Facebook defied expectations of a boffo IPO. But does its disastrous outcome spell doom for startups seeking funding? Not at all.

Facebook stock has lost 25% of its value since it went public May 18 at $38 a share. Investors took a look at its price/earnings ratio of 104 and decided that since its earnings had fallen 14% in the quarter before and General Motors had decided to pull its $10 million advertising account, Facebook was not worth $104 billion.

If its earnings grow at the 22% forecast over the next five years, the stock is worth $8 a share -- at May 29’s $28, that leaves plenty of money for short-sellers to scoop off the table.

And even though Facebook did not soar to $100 on its first day, venture-capital firms that invested early made billions in profit. Top-dog Accel Partners took in an estimated $1.8 billion that day. So there is even more money sloshing around Silicon Valley looking for a home in a rapidly growing start-up with a great chief executive.

Facebook’s busted IPO is at worst a cautionary tale for other companies that would aspire to an IPO. And the lesson is to set the offering price low enough so that investors in the IPO can make money after the first day of trading.

And following the busted Facebook IPO, two companies decided to pull their IPOs but two others are still on track. One of the on-track ones, Palo Alto Networks, offers a winning product in an attractive industry – and that’s what IPO investors want. The ones that postponed their IPOs -- Kayak and VKontakte -- may have realized that they are not yet ready to meet the higher standards that Facebook’s busted IPO has signaled, meaning a well-developed business model reflected in solid revenue and profit growth. (By the way, VKontakte's CEO recently delighted in watching people fight over the money-paper airplanes he tossed out his St. Petersberg office window.) 

Pricing even a hyped IPO low enough for investors to profit on the first day of trading can be done. In 2004, for example, Google went public at $80 and closed the day at $100. Thanks to triple-digit earnings growth, that was still a low price. Google ended 2004 at $196.

Related: What the SEC Crackdown on Secondary Markets Means for Startups

So how can your start-up get a piece of that cash? As I write in my forthcoming book, Hungry Start-up Strategy: Creating New Ventures with Limited Resources and Unlimited Vision, you must persuade a VC that your venture targets a market that’s small now but will get big fast. To do that you have to answer these four questions in the affirmative:

Can the start-up offer competitively superior customer value and generate revenues?Will rapidly growing technologies, business models, or social changes boost demand?Do potential customers have a big problem that no companies are solving?Are leading companies and technologists working to solve the problem?

What's more, you'll need to show that your company will dominate that market because you are a great CEO. To do that you must persuade the VC that you:

Have superior industry knowledge and a compelling vision for your start-up’s future.Have a winning track record and the passion to keep winning.Are smart, curious and a doer of frugal, fast experiments.Can identify and manage business risk.Have charisma, integrity and the ability to attract, hire and motivate top talent.

If you can do this, all you have to do is get a "warm introduction" to the VC -- through an intermediary who the VC trusts and who knows you well. Then you need to survive a rigorous screening process that gives you a two in 1,000 chance of winning a share of that VC cash.

Related: What Makes Facebook Worth So Much

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3 Insurance Gambles That Put Your Business at Risk

Much like sunscreen, business insurance is one of those things you don’t realize how important it is until you’ve been burned: A lot of entrepreneurs don’t have it, and those who do, may not be fully covered.

While large corporations have staffers specifically trained to be sure the business is protected adequately, small business owners are often not aware of the risks their business faces.

“Smaller businesses tend not to get the right amount of coverage,” says Loretta Worters, vice president of the Insurance Information Institute, an industry trade group that aims to educate the public about insurance. “They will get too little or not the right coverage.”

Here, three of the most common mistakes to avoid when deciding on business insurance.

1. You view insurance as one-size-fits-all. Think again. There are four basic types of insurance that all businesses need, according to Worters. Property insurance protects the building that your business is housed in and the inventory, raw materials and computers that you own. Liability insurance protects you against lawsuits. Business vehicle insurance covers any autos owned by the business. Finally, in every state except Texas, a business with employees must have workers compensation insurance should an employee be injured on the job.

Related: Do You Need a Full-Timer, Contractor or Outsourced Help?

In addition, every industry has its own specific risks and your business may require a specialized policy. “You need to get an agent that understands your line of business,” says Worters, noting that you should talk to an agent before just signing up with one. Ask a local business group or association for a recommendation.

2. You think you're covered by another policy. “The biggest mistake [business owners] make is they assume they don’t need coverage,” says Ted Devine, CEO of Dallas-based Insureon, an online small-business insurance agency. He says business owners often falsely believe their company is covered by their client's policy or they're no longer at risk when a client leaves. Not true, according to Devine. A client can come back and sue you years after an event or transaction occurs, he warns.

And don't think your homeowner's policy will bail you out, either. Even if you have a home-based business, a homeowner's policy won't protect it should you get into any legal issues with employees or business litigation. Whether the homeowners’ policy will protect your business property in your home depends on the policy, says Devine.

Related: Does Your Home Business Need Insurance?

3. You think you're invincible. Worters says many businesses don’t even consider what is called either business income or business interruption insurance. If a natural disaster hits, for example, and your business closes, your revenue can be immediately shut off for an undetermined amount of time, and that can really threaten the life of your business.

Related: Top Seven Mistakes Business Owners Make Filing Insurance Claims

Readers, do you think business insurance is important for your company? Why or why not? 

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Catherine Clifford is a staff writer at Entrepreneur.com. 

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The 7 Deadly Sins of SEO

Sin No. 1: Using the wrong keywords 
If your website doesn't use the same words that the people searching for you do, your content will never show up for those searches or be seen by the right people.

The solution? You can use Google Insights for Search to compare potential keywords, and the Google AdWords Keyword Tool (both free!) to assess search volume for those terms. Based on your research, you should use the more common terminology in your titles and headings.

For instance, if you're a realtor, your research would lead you to find that 60 percent of people use the search phrase "real estate" when they're trying to find you on the Web, whereas only 5 percent use the phrase "houses for sale."

Sin No. 2: Blocking search engines from your site
It's possible you don't want all pages of your website to appear in search engines. Two common methods of keeping pages "hidden" are placing a robots.txt file on your site or a robots meta tag on your pages. But sometimes, these methods accidentally block your entire site from being indexed -- and that's bad news.

For instance, you might block the entire site during development and testing and forget to remove the block for launch. If none of your site's pages are being indexed or they appear in search results without a title or description, check (or have your Web developer check for you) to see if the source code contains the following robots meta tag:

If you don't see that code, open a browser address bar and type in www.site.com/robots.txt (replacing "site.com" with your domain name). Check first to see if the robots.txt file looks like this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

If it does, then the entire site is blocked from search engines. This file can also be used to block particular files on a site. The easiest way to ensure this file is set up properly is to log into Google Webmaster Tools and use the robots.txt checker. You can list any page (such as your home page) and test to see if it is being blocked.

Sin No. 3: Not using descriptive internal anchor text
The words you use in links signal to search engines what a page is about. If a hundred sites link to the home page of the local ice cream store using the words "free ice cream every Wednesday," then the ice cream store home page is likely to show up for those searching "free ice cream."

Adobe learned this the hard way after linking thousands of buttons that simply say "Click here," instead of something descriptive like "Download Adobe Reader." As a result, the Adobe Reader page is the first website to pop up if you search for "click here" -- but who searches for that?

You can't control how other sites link to yours, but you can control how you link to the pages on your site internally. Make sure the text you use in those links is descriptive, both for visitors to your site and for search engines looking to better understand what your site's pages are about.

A common missed opportunity is with "read more" links. It's fine to use that text to link to the pages with more information, but make the descriptive heading a link as well. Otherwise, you are telling search engines that the page you are linking to is about … "read more."

Sin No. 4: Not making sharing easy
In the age of social media, you want to make it easy for visitors to share your content. The fact that this helps search engine optimization is a secondary benefit. But too many sites, especially with the prevalence of rich media such as AJAX and Flash, make sharing nearly impossible. Make sure that:

Every page on your site has a unique URL. When you copy and paste the URL, is the page you want then loaded, or is the beginning of a wizard or filter loaded instead?
Content doesn't load in pop-ups that contain no URL.
Sharing links on videos link back to the page that has the video embedded rather than a standalone video pop-up.

Sin No. 5: Keeping search engines in the dark about your content
Search engines read HTML text, so if all your site's content is contained in images or Flash, search engines won't know what your site is about. Richard Branson's Moroccan resort doesn't appear in searches for "Moroccan resort" because although it seems like there are plenty of words on the home page, the text is actually part of an image. So all search engines see is a blank page.

Putting text in HTML will help those accessing your site using mobile devices, screen readers or slow connections.

Sin No. 6: Not including a compelling call to action
The point of having a website and ranking well in search engines isn't about getting a lot of visitors -- it's about turning those visitors into customers. If you have a local store, do you include store hours and your address? If you sell a product, do your educational pages include links to that product?

Sin No. 7: Thinking all search traffic will go directly to your home page
Every one of your Web pages should operate as the home page of your site. Visitors often don't land directly on your home page first, learn about you a bit and then navigate further into the site. Rather, visitors will do a search, get led to a page within your site and learn everything about your organization from there. Ensure none of your pages is a dead end and include prominent branding, links to your home page and more about you, as well as relevant calls to action.

This story originally appeared on Business on Main

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Here's a Cheap Business Idea: Ikea Hauling

Dustin and Jennifer Culton started an Ikea-hauling business.

If you have an entrepreneurial itch but aren’t ready to quit your job or cash out your IRA, you may find another low-risk, low-overhead way to start a business.

Dustin Culton and his wife, Jennifer, of Omaha, Neb., did just that about a year ago, when they started Omaha Modern, an “intensive” part-time venture that netted them roughly $30,000 in the first year.

The Cultons’ business is based on their 13-hour round trip drives to the nearest Ikea store, in Minneapolis, to pick up furniture, placemats, flatware and other items with umlaut-bearing names for customers in Omaha and other Midwest cities far from the Swedish big-box retailer.

“The odds of Nebraska seeing a store locate here in my lifetime are virtually zero,” Dennis Culton says, citing a population that’s apparently too sparse for the retailer. “However, Ikea products are very stylish and have a high demand, even in markets without easy access to purchase them.”

Customers ordering directly from Ikea’s website don’t have as vast a selection as those visiting stores, and shipping costs can run higher than the product itself, Culton says, so his customers can buy more and potentially save significantly on shipping.

“We basically take the entire Ikea website and catalog and open it up to our clients,” he says.

For the Cultons, both 37 and working in the insurance industry, the business grew from their own trips to Ikea to buy items for their home. They initially made one trip a month to Minneapolis for customers and recently added a second. Dustin has made the last few trips without Jennifer, who is eight months pregnant.

The Ikea runs involve spending six to 10 hours in the store, six to 10 trips through the checkout line to buy 150 to 200 items, and filling up a 6-by-10-foot enclosed trailer that they haul with a used Cadillac Escalade. Trips can consist of $6,000 to $11,000 in volume and 15 to 25 customers’ purchases.

The couple pack their Omaha Modern trailer with goods from Ikea's Minneapolis location.

Culton estimates Ikea saw about $100,000 in sales from his business in the first year.

“In total over the past year we've had over 300 orders, so quite a bit of activity,” he says.

With a typical 30 percent to 35 percent pickup fee, Culton estimates the business has generated approximately $35,000 before expenses, $27,000 to $30,000 after. He estimates expenses amount to $400 per trip, excluding a monthly $400 vehicle payment. The trailer, which Culton had before starting the business, originally cost $2,000.

“Ikea has basically said they like that we do this, but we can’t use their logos,” Culton says.

Ikea spokeswoman Mona Liss told Entrepreneur.com: “Although the vast majority of Ikea’s sales happen in the store, we recognize and appreciate that customers far from Ikea stores want to buy from us." She added that Ikea is "working on meeting the needs of these customers by expanding our e-commerce range, reducing our e-commerce delivery prices and adding stores in new markets.”

The Cultons aren’t the only people running private businesses that deliver and assemble Ikea furniture, but it’s unclear how many make such long hauls. Last year the St. Louis Post-Dispatch profiled a couple who made similar runs from St. Louis to an Ikea in Chicago for their business, Expedite St. Louis.

As for Culton, “I'm one of those guys who has had several different ideas for products, businesses … and have always wanted to see one take off," he says. "I don't need to be rich from it, but be able to live off of something I love.”

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