Welcome to The Yodler!

Posted by Court Cunningham

Welcome to The Yodler! I am proud to announce the launch of our new blog that will cover many topics including: PPC & SEO, social media, small business marketing best practices, developments in the online advertising industry, and leadership excellence strategies from the team at Yodle. I will be contributing along with other members of the Yodle team. For this first post, I’d like to talk about the time honored tradition of New Year’s Resolutions. With all the potential and promise of a new year ahead of us, I wanted to share some guiding principles for business owners of any size in the form of Court’s New Year's Resolutions for Yodle.

1) Take time out both individually and as a leadership team for 2 days every few months to reassess where you are and how you can step up your game while putting competitors on the defensive: One of my perennial favorite quotes is from George Savile“He who leaves nothing to chance will do few things wrong. BUT he will do very few things.” This embodies one of the biggest challenges of any business or leader. Daily decision making and meetings can distract you from the truly hard work of taking intelligent risks and innovating - preventing you from making progress on the BIG goals and resolutions you started with.

2) Invest when there is blood in the street: Use the recession, which is not over, to your advantage. Spend on advertising, invest in tools to make tedious and time consuming tasks easier and hire the best employees. While your competitors are hunkering down and cutting back, they are losing out on great opportunities to improve the business. This is something we have been doing for the past year, and will continue through 2010.

3) Ask your customers for the uncomfortable truth AND act on it: Listen to your customers, clients, patients, and users. They are innately familiar with your business as the everyday consumers of your services and products. They can provide valuable feedback, even if it sometimes comes in the form of a complaint. Use surveys to help – companies like Constant Contact or Survey Monkey can help you get the answers you need.

4) Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize: Ask yourself at the beginning of every week while sitting down with your calendar,” what am I doing this week to help us exceed our goals”. Anything that is not helping should be cut from your schedule. On the center of my desk, I have a yellow sticky with our top goal for 2010 – every morning it reminds me to prioritize. When we started Yodle, my sticky said “Customer Satisfaction”. Customer Satisfaction is oxygen, without it you die. Keep a list of your most important priorities to keep track of them, and then give other tasks and projects to the people who work with you and for you. There is a lot to do and you can’t do it all yourself. A good resource for learning about lists is Rory Tahari’s book “Lists for Life”.

I don’t know if anyone can confidently predict what 2010 will hold, but I bet it won’t be boring! I look forward to the insights we’ll be able to share on this blog. Please check back each week for updates, news and information. Feel free to comment and/or e-mail me me your thoughts or ideas for new posts directly to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)