The Small Business Social Media Cheat Sheet 01/25/2012
The current "hot" social media sites explained. I would say Facebook and Twitter accounts are must-haves for most small businesses. Set them up and then use them because they are the easiest way for people to find you. Add Comment What Matters Most in Social Marketing 01/18/2012
For those who don’t have time to learn, implement and maintain an integrated program…  Google has changed marketing forever. Google Places has changed local marketing for the better. We no longer use phone books to find businesses relevant to our needs. We use search engines. And now we even carry these engines in our pocket. So what do search engines like Google and Bing and Yahoo look for? Keywords Still Matter It’s essential to have an SEO-optimized website with keywords strategically placed to tell search engines how to read your site. Read correctly, this will bump your site up in the search rankings. Why? How often do you go to Page 2 of a search? How far down do you look on Page 1? And how frustrated do you get when you can’t find a website for a local business you know is there but you can only find review sites like Yelp or UrbanSpoon? You must have meta-tags, descriptive headlines, and keywords on the page to get the search engines to truly understand what your website is all about. This “on-page” ranking criteria is the easiest and fastest way for small organizations to compete with monster sites that are not LOCAL. Inbound Links Matter “Off-page” criteria factor into the search rankings too. Internet marketing is now largely about increasing the number of inbound links to your website from “quality” sites. The more people who come to your site from legitimate highly ranked sites, the more the search engines read your site as a quality site that can be trusted. This is why blogging has been pushed as an essential for anyone with a website. Blogging allows for fresh content to be constantly attached to your website and gives plenty of opportunities for site owners to hyperlink to pages within their own site. Fresh content updates and lots of inbound links to a variety of web pages on a site looks great to Google, et. al. But not every business needs to blog. It’s a smart strategy if you want to become an expert commentator in your field, but you need to weigh the time needed with the benefits gained. If you decide blogging is not for you or your business, eNewsletters can accomplish much of what blogging does in terms of inbound linking. Sending out a regular newsletter with multiple hyperlinks to your web pages about topics, events or news brings more traffic to your site. Asking your mailing list recipients to forward, “like” or share the newsletter with their friends puts your messages in front of new people… people who will also be encouraged to sign up for you newsletter. Social media or micro-blogging posts also accomplish the same thing, and, done with the right style and voice, have a better chance of being shared and liked… which gets your message in front of new people… future repeat customers… who will also increase your inbound links beyond your email contact list. Other Factors Matter Too… Search engines factor in a slew of other factors to determine ranking along with all the above… things like age of domain, site structure, domain name relevance, speed/load time of a page, etc. The Bottom Line for You? Which factors should a small organization or business focus on when they don’t have in-house marketing and can’t afford a consultant? Inbound Links. Period. The consensus among internet marketers is that if you do absolutely nothing with the on-page factors and the slew of other factors, but have a steady flow of inbound links, you will still rank fairly well. But not having any inbound links or having poor quality links, even with perfect on-page and other factors, you will rank poorly. Daily Deals Death Spiral? 01/03/2012
 I've read a few different 2012 predictions on why the daily deal sites will slowly lose favor with business owners and consumers. They often give consumers who would have paid full price a reason to pay only half, and as this article points out, customers are getting email fatigued by all the sites that have jumped on the bandwagon. I recently did the math on a local deal completed by a Seattle business. Over $4500 of profit was given away on the deal, and that doesn't include what was paid out to the deal site. Consider that the deal was only live for two days, so awareness to the larger non-buying public was minimal. Consider how many people who bought the deal who will not come back (4 out of 5) according to the above article, and those who bought it because the business was already a regular stop. And then consider how using that same money for consistent monthly marketing projects would have kept the business top of mind for consumers anywhere from 5 to 12 months, depending on the level of efforts. Deals are fast and flashy, but consistency always wins in the end. If you're going to do a deal with one of the big guns, be smart and figure out what you are willing to give away in the process. Here is a handy guide from The Deal Mix that will help local businesses make the best deal for themselves. 
|  AuthorMichelle Hippler is a marketing consultant with a focus on sustainability. ArchivesCategoriesAll | ||
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