One Social Network I Couldn't Work Without

"... if I had to pick just one, LinkedIn would win, hands down."

We recently had a presentation in our Internet marketing clinic on social media and how small businesses can use it to their advantage. In this presentation, there seemed to be a bias toward Facebook. For a different point of view, check out this link.

Jennifer, who has been around a while and has lots of good advice, gives a good example of how to use LinkedIn as a business tool. She provides the kind of concrete detail that makes it easy to see how to relate her experience to your own situation. No two people have exactly the same situation or circumstances to deal with. We all have to adjust these stories to our own needs, and this is the kind of report that makes it easy to do so.

The bigger point, of course, is that the Internet is a huge resource, and the trick is to figure out how to exploit it most effectively for your own business requirements.

Paying for Creativity in a Digital World

"Esther Dyson, made a striking prediction: that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”"

This is a concept that is central to promoting your business over the Internet, and one that businesses new to the web frequently have to struggle to understand. As we emphasize constantly in our free Internet Marketing classes, content is the key to success on the web, and the content must be meaningful and valuable to the targets of the outreach effort that the web site is.

Businesses that are accustomed to selling their knowledge have to realize that their model of promotion over the web involves giving knowledge away in order to attract prospects. This often requires an adjustment in understanding the business model. Different businesses have different problems with adjusting to this proposition. In the article cited, sales of ancillary products are used to make up the difference in income production. Krugman describes how the Grateful Dead gave away their music, but made up for that through sale of "hats, T-shirts and performance tickets." That model will not work for many professional businesses that are now marketing over the Internet.

Attorneys, CPA's, counselors of all kinds who have specialized knowledge have to learn how to present their services with a different value proposition. One idea is that what they are really selling is not their knowledge of a particular environment, but the expert application of that knowledge to a specific situation that the prospect is facing! Anyone should be able to understand the difference between getting general advice over a website and the value of having a knowledgeable professional examine your particular case and help you determine how to deal with whatever problem you are attempting to solve. It is this sort of distinction that professionals have to get comfortable with in order to be successful in marketing over the Internet.

Using SEO as an example, we give away a great deal of knowledge about optimizing a site for substantial performance, but there is no substitute for having a professional SEO marketer work with the particular requirements of your business, your marketplace, and your site to achieve a dominance on the web that rewards your business with a high level of targeted traffic. Every business faces slightly different challenges, and knowing the tools that are available and identifying the best way to utilize them in each particular situation is where the value of the professional practitioner comes into play!

Local Search Improves Your Business!

"You only have to compete with similar businesses in your AREA."

Many businesses are strictly local in their reach and competing on the worldwide web does not contribute much to the bottom line. However, the web is a great source of locally oriented inquiries as well. The important thing is knowing how to reach those locally oriented searchers effectively.

This article from Derek Gehl's newsletter discusses how people search for local services by adding city, state, community or neighborhood-specific terms to more general searches in order to find the businesses or services that are relevant to their needs.

Derek provides a very useful listing of sites where you can submit your site to acquire links that are oriented to your locale. I have incorporated his listing in my spreadsheet of useful links for your convenience.

In addition, Jay recently (April 9, 2008) presented a new technique in our clinic for enhancing your site for local searches. This technique relies upon how Google responds to particular combinations of text and links within your site. Join us twice a month in our free Internet Marketing Class at UH SBDC for regular updates on the best way to make your site into an efficient prospect-gathering tool for your business!

The Open Secret of Success: Toyota and the Web

"The principle is often known by its Japanese name, kaizen—continuous improvement."

The New Yorker had an article talking about the fact that Toyota has just overtaken General Motors as the world's leading seller of automobiles, 160,000 more cars in the first 3 months of 2008 than GM! The article goes on to discuss how Toyota has achieved this landmark not through "cool new products and technological breakthroughs" but through innovations in process.

What the writer attributes Toyota's success to is the fact that they excel at continually making incremental improvements to their operations. In reading this, it struck me that this is the same approach that we always recommend for making a web site into a powerful and dynamic marketing tool. The techniques that we teach in our Internet Marketing class get their power and effectiveness from persistence in application of the principles to the creation and maintenance of the site.

Near the end of the article, I found these statements:

"Toyota’s innovative methods may seem mundane, but their sheer relentlessness defeats many companies. That’s why Toyota can afford to hide in plain sight: it knows the system is easy to understand but hard to follow."

This illustrates another point from our workshops, which is, the same techniques that we employ to create powerful sites are available to larger companies with much larger budgets, but for a variety of reasons, they do not use them! This is what makes it possible for s small site with a small budget to compete effectively with bigger operations.

How 3 Lines of Code Can Improve Your Rankings

"... different versions of the same pages can get indexed in search engines. ...
...
You should be in control of what versions of your site and pages get indexed, and not leave it up to search engines to decide."

Here is a good description of a tip that we have mentioned in class for years.

The issue described here has to do with different configurations of your URL that other sites might link to. For example,

• http://samplesite.com
• http://www.samplesite.com
• http://samplesite.com/default.php
• http://www.samplesite.com/index.html

all refer to different pages, at least as far as the search engines are concerned. If your site can be reached in various ways, like these, you may be losing some "oomph" in your ranking power.

A simple test will show you whether you have a problem or not. Type your URL into the address bar in each of the several configurations that might be relevant, then observe the actual URL that you land on. If different configurations result in your landing on the exact same URL, you are probably all right. If not, then you need to look into the advice provided in this article. The author tells you what you need to do to clear up the problem. Caution: if you are not a web developer, this is a little technical, but your web hosting company or web developer should be able to take care of it for you with no difficulty. If not, you have a bigger problem!

Attention to detail is very important in achieving optimal results with your Internet Marketing strategy, and this is one of those details that is easily overlooked, but can be very beneficial to get right!

How Much is a Top Google Ranking Worth to Your Business?

"In 2004 at the New York Search Engine Strategies conference a JupiterMedia analyst stated that 5 out of 6 commercial purchases which originated from search originated from the organic search results. They also stated 'algorithmic listings in search indexes generate an estimated six in seven commercially natured search referrals.'

2008 Penn State research titled Determining the informational, navigational and transactional intent of Web queries [PDF] found that roughly 80% of search queries were informational, while approximately 10% were each navigational and transactional. With so many searches being informational and navigational, it is unsurprising that people click the organic search results more often than the associated PPC ads."

This is a very extensive article with a lot of information about how to estimate a value for different ranking positions. There is more in this article than I can summarize in a single entry, but the quote above jumped out at me.

To summarize briefly what I found interesting in this selected quote:

1. Most commercial activity originated from search is due to organic results!
2. Ranking determines 6 out of 7 commercially oriented referrals!
3. Some 80% of searches are informational in nature as opposed to transactional or navigational!

These points really emphasize how important performing on organic searches can be to a business. Participants in our free Internet Marketing Clinic receive current information on the best techniques for making your web site perform well in this crucial arena!

This article is well worth some time to study, but be forewarned that it is full of information and will take some concentration.

Using Press Releases Effectively

I just read an excellent article offered on the site above as a free eBook download. this piece is chock full of great advice and links that everyone should know about. I recommend that everyone interested in enhancing his/her site performance read, no, study, the complete document, but I will attempt to summarize below the concepts that particularly caught my attention in it.

"New" means marketing directly to the user, not just through the media that press releases used to be addressed to. Media attention now becomes a "fringe benefit" of your press releases!

Press releases used to be about "big news", but no more. Anything your organization is doing can be fodder for a release now. For example (as the author suggests),

• CEO speaking at a conference? Write a release.
• Win an award? Write a release.
• Have a new take on an old problem? Write a release.
• Add a product feature? Write a release.
• Win a new customer? Write a release.
• Publish a white paper? Write a release.
• Get out of bed this morning? Okay, maybe not… but you are thinking the right way now!

Use distribution services to get your news out to the broad audience available. The article suggests four well known services, which can also be found in my file of useful links (Search the links page in the file for the phrase "press release sites".)

Don't forget to include the news on your web site. You should have a PR section of your site where you collect all your releases. Keep them there for as long as the information is relevant (why not forever?)

Consider "answering questions" and "browsability" in creating content! Keywords emphasize the first, but navigation and suggestions emphasize the second. Suggest things to people that they didn't think to ask!

Include the Press Release as a PDF in case people want to print it for any reason.

Pay attention to links in the PR. That gets people to your site, and increases your ranking. This means that you have to have the appropriate content on your site. That may mean writing something for the site before creating the PR.

Speak in terms that your buyers/users/clients use. That may include jargon, but mostly does not.

"On the best sites, content does more than just sell product – it directly contributes to an organization’s positive reputation by showing thought-leadership in the marketplace of ideas."

Segment your audience and release to every segment specifically!

Create something of interest that you can "mail" to people. Yes, snail mail, so you get their real addresses! Downloading is good, but sometimes people will want printed content that you can add value to.