Small Business New Years Resolutions

• Lose the Budget – this one might be hard for a lot of small businesses to think about doing, especially if you’re business is having some cash flow problems. However, Internet Marketing tactics should be judged solely on their Return on Investment. If your campaigns are achieving a positive ROI – why cut the campaign short? Perhaps starting out with a test budget might set your minds at ease – then you can take a look at the numbers and decide whether you’d like to continue or not.
• Start your own Network – While it is important for a company to have it’s own social marketing campaigns going, it is just as important for the main players in a business to be well versed in the ways of social networking. Get the sales team, President, VP, and head of marketing all involved in social campaigns. This will give your company the chance to be an authority in your field on the Internet and will allow you to secure more business for your company.
• Take a look at your staff – Hiring the right staff is the most important thing a company can do – and your company is only as strong as it’s weakest link. Take a look around the office and determine if your company is working with all the right people. If you the year prior brought some unpleasantry to your company from a few of your employees, maybe it’s time to move on. It’s never fun to let go of someone – but it could be the most important move you’ve ever made.
• Set monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals – and STICK TO THEM. Set them for yourself, your sales team, your entire staff, and company wide – and let your employees know what they are. Communication and transparency inside of your business are important. It makes everyone feel like they’re a part of the team and it gives everyone something to try to reach and set rewards for reaching goals. Also, dont’ set them too high – If you set goals that are unrealistic then your employees won’t ever take them seriously.
• Read about new technologies – The most important game changer in your field may be the new technologies arising. Don’t rely on your IT department to tell you what technologies you need – sometimes you’ll hire a proactive IT department but in most cases they are more concerned with self preservation and security. Get creative and try some new things this year – don’t be afraid to have some fun with it.

So those are some ideas for your business this new year. Take my advice, or create some solid resolutions for your company. No matter what you decide to do – take some time to reflect and improve upon the things that your company does well. Happy New Year!

Some will search for you by name, some will search for you by product type, and some will search for businesses who sell products like yours locally. The constant is that they will search. Direct traffic doesn’t often come from print ads, radio spots, or any other form of traditional advertising. So for those of you not focusing on search get ready – I’m about to show you how to Dominate your competition through search.

As stated above there are three types of searches that people will do that either will or will not lead to them finding you. These three ways are – Brand Searches, Product Searches, and Local Searches. now it does get a little more complex than that but as Michael Scott says it’s better to “Keep it simple stupid.” I am going to first define each of these searching types and then tell you how to target them specifically.

Types of Searches

Brand Searches
Brand searches are any search query that a consumer enters into Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. that search for a specific brand name. Your brand name is your company, big boy examples are Coke, Facebook, McDonalds. Now if your small business is uniquely named you shouldn’t have too much of a problem ranking number 1 for these search queries – however, there are many small businesses that have at least a few competitors out there with the same or similar brand name – for instance we have a “Chevy Guy” in Columbus – but so does just about every other major big city in the country. So if you want to outrank the opponent – you’ll have to do some competitive research to determine how to outclass them for that brand name.
Product Searches
These are going to be the most competitive style of search that you’ll have to deal with. Unless you selling something completely unique you’ve got others who sell the same exact product for you. As a small business selling auto parts and others – you’re probably not going to be able to compete with the likes of Advance Auto Parts and Napa for the broad searches. however, you may be able to compete at the local level with some of these people. More than likely your best bet is to try to corner your online market with specific products that maybe the big boys don’t have, or you beat their price. Do some competitive research to see where your pricing and product offering stand with the rest in your field.

What to Focus On

• Product Offering – look for unique products that you sell and try to leverage your online presence with those first
• Price Point – where are you outdoing your competition on price. With shopping engines and the ability to comparison shop more and more – focusing your efforts on these products will serve you well
• Be Unique – especially if you’re business has a lot of competition look for ways to stand out from the rest of the field and highlight them and focus on them through search and on your landing pages.

Local Searches
There are two major types of local searches and they are derivatives of the above mentioned. Branded local search and product local search. There are various opportunities for your company to stand out in local search. First and foremost make sure that if local is the way you want to go that you’re targeting your area as a keyword on your major pages. Homepage, category pages, product pages. This will help people who are located in your area find you easier.

Where to leverage Local Search

• Google Places First and foremost you have to have a strong Google Place page. Google indexes these pages regularly and places HUGE amount of weight on local search for products and brand names that have strong, keyword targeted, and relevant Google Place pages. Add as much relevant information as possible, hours of operation, closest intersections, products you sell, pictures of your store, and even video. They will bring people in.
• Yelp Yelp is a heck of a good place for you to create a page for your business. They focus on neighborhoods and cities and allow people to review and comment on stores. This will also help your Google Place page rank well and give people even more relevant reviews and information on your company.
• Local Chamber Websites being apart of your local chamber of commerce will give you a link and directly tie you to a specific area. These links are high value links that Google will place great weight on towards ranking you highly in the search engines.

The key to dominating your competitors through search is leverage. You have to find the places where you are unique, figure out what they’re doing, and get ahead of them. Figuring out which products and types of searches that your customers are more likely to do is important – use the Google Traffic Estimator to figure out which of your products your customers are searching for and figure out how stiff the competition is. If you believe that you’ve got what it takes to compete then target those keywords. The key is to target the areas that will bring you the most amount of traffic.

Now – I do this for a living, and do it on a daily basis for clients. If you’re interested in a competitive search analysis for your business Contact Me, tweet me, or just hit up the contact form on the website. You stay classy now readers. Have a good one.

Thanks to my buddy Chris “Yeeples” Welsh for pointing this one out to me. Also, thanks to the orginail posters of this info graphic.

Picking Your Target

Choosing your target is very important as it will set the guidelines for the rest of your link building strategy. Here are a few quick steps to choosing your target for your link building strategy.

Pick a Niche – the more relevant it is to your specific product market the better your chance will be to gain links. So if you sell clothing, the niche that you should pick would be fashion related. You’ll want to contact blogs, websites, blog carnivals, directories, and list building sites in this niche. Try to be realistic with who you’re going to contact, for instance if you’re blog or website isn’t very well established, you’re probably not going to be getting a lot of links from the NYTimes.com fashion section. Make sense?

Build a Contact List – As you’re finding all of these sites that you want to contact make sure that you’re gathering the sites information. You’ll want a valid contact name, url of the site, email address, and phone number. The phone number isn’t necessary but sometimes it’s nice to follow up your link building email with a phone call to see if the person you sent it to had the chance to look over your email. IMPORTANT!! Make sure you’re saving these contacts in an excel sheet, you’ll need it in that format to pull this all together at the end.

Writing for your target

Alright so you’ve got your target all picked out and your contact list is building. Now you need to come up with a compelling story to write for your target. There are a few things that you’re going to want to take into account when you’re coming up with what type of article to write.

First and foremost, you need to write and article that is viral ready. It needs to be something that people are going to want to share with others. It should evoke emotion. Humor generally does really well and if it’s really funny it can spread like wildfire.

It has to be relevant to your target market. Top 10 lists, Top 100 lists, generally work very well.

Emailing Your Target

When emailing your target, you want to be short and to the point. People are going to decide within the first 5 seconds of opening the email whether they want to check it out or move on to the next email. Bloggers especially get a lot of emails. IMPORTANT!! Subject line is very important. Here are a few Email Subject Line Tips. It also doesn’t help to stroke their ego a bit (see below) but be specific so that it looks like you’ve spent a good amount of time looking into them otherwise you’ll get spammed.

Here is an Example Link Building Email:

Hello (Contact Name),

I’m Jenny from FashionistaWorld.com. I was checking out your site and I really your article on winter coats (insert link to their article here) I have the green jacket you were talking about and it is delightful! I also have a fashion website and I’d really love it if you’d take a look at this article I posted (Post Title Here). I’d love to get your opinion on it and if you’d like to link to it I’d really appreciate that as well.

(Insert Link to Post Here)

Thanks for your time (contact name),

(email signature here)

END EXAMPLE

When you’re contacting these people and stroking their ego make sure that you pull out a little tidbit from the article and give a quick sentence or two on something specific from their website. If you don’t, you’re just going to look like a spammer and they’re never going to even look at your article let alone link to it. (Note when contacting a big number of people you

Pulling It All Together

So now you’re ready, you’ve got your article written, your contact list made (in excel form) and you’re example email all ready to go. The thing that brings all of these together is created a simple emailing script using excel to plug in the info for the contact name, the URL of your ego stroking talking point, the talking point about the article, and their email address. Make sure you test it a few times on yourself before sending out the email.

If you don’t have any programming capabilities, then you’ll have to contact each person individually. I’ve done it before and it does take some time but it is well worth the effort. Taking the time to put all of this stuff in the excel sheet makes it easier during the emailing process to just copy and paste it into your email. We also offer this service as part of our link building package and SEO packages.

This strategy does work, I’ve used it TONS of times and seen great results.

*I’d like to give a shout out to my great friend Brian T. for teaching me the strategy, and helping me to implement it when I was just starting out. Please take the time to check out his latest project Funny T-shirts there are some really funny tees on the site and they are completely customizable.

The Big Three

1. Business Connections – In your years as a business owner I’m sure that you’ve made valuable connections with other business people and organizations. For instance, maybe you’re a member of your local chamber of commerce. Contact these places and ask them for a link to your website. Relationships matter in business and it certainly helps if you have a few friends that can help you get off to a good start in your link building campaign
2. Donation Links – If your business is anything like our small business you get hit up a lot for donations from local charities. Giving is a great thing and I encourage every business to do as much of it as they can. It doesn’t hurt to request a link to your site from the charities site in exchange for the donation. Most of the charities would be more than willing to link to your site, especially if your donation is lucrative.
3. Press Releases – From both the past and the future. If your company has gotten any press in the past, go back and make sure that the story links to your website. In the future, whenever you get requests to do a piece on your company, or send out a press release make sure you ask them to link to your website as well. Online press is the best kind of press because it allows you to reach more eyes for a longer period of time and often will help your link building and SEO efforts tremendously.

Link building is a tough and tedious task. Many people choose to outsource their link building to other companies because of the amount of time that it takes. There are pros and cons to both ways of doing it. On the one hand you’re saving yourself a lot of time, on the other hand you don’t know how legitimate the link building strategies might be if you outsource the work. Whichever strategy you take, make sure that you don’t forget about link building. It is the most important part of SEO, and SEO is the most important part of online marketing, especially if you want any longevity out of your online business.

What is Product Feed Syndication?
Product feed syndication is an idea that I’m not sure has truly been defined yet but I aim to do so right here. Syndication from a business standpoint usually refers to the supplying of information or content to others usually by means of a subscription. Product feed syndication would be the allowing of customers, affiliates, to download your product feed and distribute it throughout the web.

How it can be used
From a supplier standpoint product feed syndication can be astronomically effective at aiding your clients in the sales process. Create a feed that is completely optimized for the search engines, has beautiful product images, and has effective copy in the description for sales. Many suppliers will give their clients access to bits of information in order for them to help sell their products, but not the whole package. Why? Beats me.

Why Product Feed Syndication?
As a supplier to small businesses, your customers (the small businesses) do not have the time or the resources to create beautifully optimized product descriptions, take all of the images, and then upload them one-by-one to their own databases. It can take them weeks, months, or even years to perfect it. With the creation of a product feed for your products and delivering it to your clients you give them the opportunity to sell your products effectively right away. More sales for them will certainly equate into more sales for you.

Small Business Product Feed Syndication
The same way that your suppliers should offer you product feed syndication, is the same way that you should offer it to your sales team. Creating a product feed from your entire database is a smart idea for a few reasons.

1. It can be used and distributed by your affiliates in your affiliate program to achieve higher sales goals
2. You can distribute it to shopping sites like Amazon and eBay
3. You can distribute it to search engines and other shopping engines
4. You can distribute your products to people on social media sites like Facebook

The Bottom Line
The bottom line when it comes to product feed syndication and distribution is that it is a time saver for your sales people to sell your products. It also allows for your products to be distributed to more areas of the internet. It’s just like it works in the real world. The more sales tools and people you have out there selling your product, the more opportunities you’ll have to increase sales.

How To Get Started

Getting started with product feed syndication is as easy as creating a product feed. There are two ways to go about doing that, you can make the feed yourself product-by-product or you can hire a web developer to create the feed for you. Recently we launched the product feed building service for our other small business clients. We saw that it was in high demand with our clients and we couldn’t find anyone else who offered the service. Automation of your feed and product feed creation can be an extremely useful tool. Whether you decide to build the feed yourself, or hire someone else to do it for you. You should get started on it today, you won’t be sorry when you see the sales coming in after the project’s completion.

Visit the small business resources section and you will see some of the resources that I’ve already added to the section. Our hope is to make this section of our website fully alive and constantly updating. We want this section to be a one stop shop for all of your small business marketing needs.

The interent houses a lot of information, but unless you know what to search for, you’ll never find it all. Visit the Small Business Resource Center today

Submit your Resource

Think you have a resource worth listing? Submit your listing today. We are looking for valuable resources of all kinds for our small business resource section. Please make your submission web marketing related and visit our submission page.  A link back to the resource center is not require but is appreciated.

In my experience in SEO Google’s search results have never been so lucid as these type of results. I’m wondering if Google is now starting to implement a new form of indexing and rankings. What is weird about this is the number of spots that I was placed in for that search query, not that I dropped from one to 4. I’ve seen sites go from 1 to 10 in 24 hours, but they’ve never held that many positions in the search query itself.

What could this potentially mean for SEO? How can companies adapt to this type of instant ranking and indexing system? Has anyone else noticed this type of activity happening for their clients or in their own search rankings? Has Google started changing the way that it weights long tail search rankings?

While that is a great job at PR by Google, I’m not buying it. Google really messed up here for a number of reasons. One, they forced all of the users of their gmail service into Google Buzz. Two, they forced each user to auto follow all of the other gmail users in their contacts list. Three, they made the default setting post your “buzzes” publically. Hello PRIVACY ISSUES! A simple apology is just not good enough from a company of that size. They didn’t just lose email files, their server didn’t just shut down. They essentially made everyone’s private issues public. Google, the largest search engine on the face of the earth, one of the most influential companies in the history of commerce, and the single largest holder of information in the world, made a big no no.

I don’t know if you’ve been reading about the latest search battle news but I’m pulling for Bing. Besides, competition in the search engine marketing world will be good for most internet marketeers. So the next time you search, I’m encouraging everyone to Bing It!

Step One

Go to google and perform the following searches -

“Daily Link Roundup”
“Weekly Link Roundup”
“Monday Link Roundup”
“Friday Link Roundup”
“Link Roundup”

Step Two

Find Blogs that are similar to your blog and contact the owner with some of your best content attached. Make sure you spice up the email a little bit with some information about their site, and maybe even comment on a specific article of theirs that you read.

By Buttering them up a little bit I can 100% guaruntee you that you will see more responses than if you were just to send them the content. It makes them feel good because it makes them feel like people are paying attention to them, and really care about their site.

Step 3

Go to Blog Carnival and find some blog carnivals that are related to you topics of discussion and submit.

Not only will you start to see an increase in traffic, but each piece of content that you get in either one of the daily link round-ups or a blog carnival is a solid link back to your site. It’s the perfect way to start getting more easy traffic to your site.

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