The difference between something not working and failing is huge and one that most people are not good at recognizing. This has come up a couple of times this week and so I wanted to get it out there, in writing for the world to see!

I was talking with my buddy Cyndee the other day and she said “oh I tried that and it is not working”. She then went on to other things that she is trying now AND talked about things that WERE working. The main point is that she NEVER felt like she failed, just tried and something was not working.

My other buddy Deb and I get together and try stuff all the time. We are ridiculous and naive, never assuming that it will not work, just saying that we are going to try and do it. Some of those things ARE working now and some have fallen flat on their faces BUT instead of focusing on the ones that do not work, we choose to look at the ones that did and then figure out how to do more of those things.

I talk to lots of clients who “tried” a website and it “failed” because no one came. They “tried” an email campaign years ago and it “failed” because there were no sales. They “tried” facebook but “failed” because they got no business from it.

I think this may be the most important post I have written this year. There I said it. If you get nothing else from reading this, STOP THINKING YOU FAILED.

I am not going to throw out that old Thomas Edison lightbulb thing or the gagillion other stories about people who overcame adversity to conquer all. This is just a little post about changing how you think about yourself and what you do.

Start trying things today. If they do not work, try something else and do not waste one second on worrying about it. Learn what you can from it, do not do that part of it again and try something else!

If you have success stories of things you have tried that worked, please feel free to post them here. If you have any failures, go back to the beginning and start reading again because you missed the point!

Related posts:

1. Small Business Marketing Goals Make A Huge Difference
2. How To Leverage Google – Do More of What Is Working!

Small business marketing planning is something most entrepreneurs and small business owners never do, much to their detriment. They spend their time jumping from the latest new thing to the next big thing, never stopping for a breath.

So what does small business marketing planning entail exactly? Here are some of the steps that we take our marketing clients through that could help you to get your marketing efforts on track:

• Who are the clients you are trying to attract
• How have you found them before
• What products and services do they like
• What products and services should you offer
• What channels (online, offline, social media, direct mail, etc) should you use to reach those people with your offer
• What steps are you going to take this month, this week, today to implement your marketing plan
• What metrics are you going to use to gauge your success? Added contacts, friends, followers, sales, leads, etc.

One of the first things you should notice about this is that at no time did I say do you want a new logo, blog, email program or any other specific thing that is the flavor of the moment. All of the shiney marketing things like Facebook, WordPress, and Email are just the TOOLS to use and are a HUGE distraction to your plan. Figure out WHAT to do BEFORE you figure out HOW you are going to accomplish it!

These are just a few of the parts of creating a SUCCESSFUL marketing plan. If you implement just a couple you will be MILES ahead of your competition. If you implement them all, you cannot fail!

Related posts:

1. How To Market Your Small Business
2. Marketing Planning Seminar for Real Estate
3. Small Business Marketing There is no set it and forget it!

Affiliate marketing is a topic that comes up A LOT in my world. Bloggers are often affiliate marketers and I have just one word of warning for them. Make sure to follow your passion!

Many of the small business blogs that we develop are for affiliates. Oftentimes they have picked a topic that is “hot” by doing research on trends and search volume. I have done that in the past. Sigh.

Every time I have made the decision to do affiliate marketing with no passion behind it, I have petered out early. Now do not get me wrong, passion comes in many forms and it is easy to find a way to monazite your passion but pick your topic wisely!

The benefit of doing an affiliate blog with a hot topic is that you have the opportunity to get fast money. There are serious downfalls also:

• AFFILIATE MARKTING COMPETITION – this is a biggie. If you are not serious about spending some major adwords coin on keywords, you are probably not going to see a huge amount of traffic right off the bat. Make money online is a great niche but the cost per click is about 3 bucks. Not cheap.
• AFFILIATE BURNOUT – I can tell you unilaterally, if you are not at least somewhat interested in your category you will come to hate it more than life itself. I keep reading about fishing, lures, tackle, etc. So when Christmas rolled around I figured it would be a great idea to have a list of presents for fishermen. Argg. I HATE fishing. It took me 10 times as long to research fishing presents as it did for me to research crafting presents (I like crafting) since I had no background other than having fished 30 plus years ago with my grandfather.
• ORGANIC KEYWORD COMPETITION – Now I am HUGE proponent of picking big keywords and having a long term plan for ranking well for them. That having been said, if this is just a little affiliate blog without tons of content, you will struggle to beat the established players in your niche market. If your category is not your passion, coming up with content or even content ideas will be a struggle.

So how do you make your passion pay? If you are a passionate green living nut, find a product or service to sell that goes along with your lifestyle, DO NOT pick something because it is hot. Today on clickbank the top selling product seems to be SatelliteDirect – Highest Converting Tv To PC Product. That is SO not a green item and would not be a good fit.

I was “watching” Seth Godin’s ebook the other day over at Vook and he talked about the farmers market Zeitgeist. Now the farmers had no way of knowing that eating well would be coming back into vogue BUT they had the products and systems in place to serve foodies when it did! Pick a topic that is trending but not super hot and then build a destination for people to come to.

Cathy over at Copy Cat Copywriting had a great post the other day about online marketing and picking a buying niche. It is SO worth a read!

Related posts:

1. How To Find Your Small Business Passion
2. Small Business Affiliate Programs Overview
3. Small Business Affiliate Partner Programs

Small business internet marketing is not a sprint, it is a get rich slow scheme. As with anything that is important to your business, it takes time to build up a audience AND the skills to do the work. Here are a couple of the things that I do on a regular basis to market my company and the time it takes to do them!

Write Blog Posts – this is the MOST important thing I do for my small business internet marketing efforts! When I write a post and publish it more people come to my website – DUH. I have a goal of 10,000 visits per month and the ONLY thing that will get me there is having new great content AND making sure that it is written correctly so that search engines can find it.

There are three types of blog posts I write:

1. Evergreen Blog Posts – These are meant to be information that will not get stale and which will help my small business owners no matter what happens with different platforms like facebook or wordpress. Some of my recent evergreen posts cover things like keyword research, naming your products and email marketing. While these things may change form from time to time, they are a part of doing business on the internet in our time. These posts can take between 1-2 hours and usually require a little research.
2. Current Information Posts – These are posts that cover a new product or tool that I think my readers would like. Generally I put some content there with a link to whatever I am talking about and these take only about 15 minutes to write. Now sometimes I put a video up on how to use them over at the Marketing Artfully membership site which adds another half hour or so.
3. My Opinion Posts – I think that I like these the best. This is one of those posts! Basically what I do is write about how I do my business or what I think about a topic that would be relevant to my readership. These posts take between 15 minutes for a shorty and half an hour for a long one like this.

Keep Track Of My Marketing “Stuff”

The next most important thing I do is make sure all of my marketing links, products and services are up to date. Things change in business and checking back regularly to make sure that your offerings reflect your current business is super important. Just this week I realized that an old post had a link to a service we no longer offer so I changed that link. I also saw that one of my profiles had old information and fixed that too. I HATE that I have to do this as I am no different than anyone else. I wish that I could just do everything once and have it be finished but that is not the real world and wishing for that does not help me or add to my success. I would say that once a month I take about an hour to look at different things and at least once a day I find something I can tweek and make better.

Promoting My Site

This is a biggie. I spend a lot of time each day doing something that will help drive traffic back to Marketing Artfully but all of it matters. Here are some things I do and timelines:

• Speaking – I go out and talk to humans and let them know that there is a wealth of small business marketing on my site. This takes about 10 hours per week counting networking and teaching.
• Bookmarking – This is a hoot! I was teaching class the other day and telling people to click the little link at the bottom of their blog posts to share them and get more traffic. Someone asked if I had to do that every time I posted and was horrified when I said yes. REALLY? It takes me exactly 6 minutes to bookmark to 10 websites like stumble upon, google, digg and more (I timed it today). Now it took me a couple of hours initially to get them set up but they drive hundreds of people to my site each month. Well worth the time it took!
• Commenting on other blogs – HUH this takes about 15 minutes a day more or less. I have a bunch of blogs that get emailed to me or show up in my google reader so I don’t have to look too hard for things to comment on AND I like learning about new things so this is pleasure for me to do.
• Setting up incoming links – I make free websites that have links back to my blog and targeted keywords. I do not do this regularly enough but when I sit down to do it it takes a couple of hours to make multiple backlinks.

Email Marketing

I only send out a couple of emails a month so I would say this takes me two hours a month. Nothing sexy here, just making sure that I send great information to people who really want to read it.

Making Videos

This is one I think small business owners are afraid of! It takes me 10 minutes to make a video using jingproject.com and pop it up to youtube. It takes me 10 minutes to do a video with my flip camera and pop it up to youtube.

Now when I do the training videos for my membership site it takes about an hour a video since there are intro and editing and uploading BUT that is only for people who are doing fancy-schmancy training. Most of the time I opt for down and dirty with great information and more of it than I could do if each video was a work of art.

Well I hope that helps – this post is running to just over a thousand words, took me about a half an hour to write and I actually enjoyed knowing that some small business owners would benefit from knowing how little time it takes to succeed online!

PS – I was prompted to write this post because I got an email in my inbox that said “How I Made $54,281 in 90 Minutes By Doing This One Thing” which implied that if I bought his product that I could make 54K with no work and with no effort!!!

Related posts:

1. Small Business Marketing Magic – There is no get rich quick!
2. Small Business Internet Marketing – RSS Feeds
3. Small Business Internet Marketing Tools

When you are doing internet marketing, keyword and product names are more important than almost anything else you can do. It is great to have a product or service, but if no one can find it then you are going to have trouble making sales!

Friday I wrote a post about Small Business Marketing Naming Concepts which covered the basics of generally naming your products but I feel like I missed something in the internet marketing translation.

Why Keywords and Product Names Matter

I cannot stress this enough, keyword and product names matter more today than ever! Getting sales or leads from the internet relies on humans being able to find your company while doing searches. People find information by doing looking on search engines. Every one of you has “googled” something at least once in your life so you know what I am talking about. Search engines are just databases of information that is indexed by taking words you use and comparing them to words other humans use and seeing if they match.

This is not rocket science. If I name my best product Small Business Internet Express instead of naming it the Marketing Artfully Success System I have more of a chance of showing up in the search engines for the search term “small business internet” which is closer to my product than using my company name or obscure terms like success system.

Just so you know what this would mean to your business in the real world:

• Small Business Internet is searched 49,500 times per month
• Success System is searched 33,100 times per month and
• Business Success System has not enough searches to even estimate

So if I was trying to let small business owners know that I am selling internet products, the name I am using DEFINITELY will have a better chance of being found than something less fun and sexy. Now I KNOW it not fun to name your products what they are. It is more fun to make great marketing campaigns based on something funny or clever, BUT that makes it harder to get the word out there.

As a small business owner, I do not have the resources to do a branding campaign big enough to get the general public and especially the search engines to understand that a made up name is really a small business internet marketing program.

Related posts:

1. Internet and Keyword Marketing Are Constantly Changing
2. Small Business Keyword Marketing
3. Small Business Internet Marketing – RSS Feeds

Every once in a while I like to get back to old school marketing and talk about how small business marketing naming concepts work in the real world! People will ONLY buy what they can understand and they do not have your knowledge of the back story of your products.

This is the WORST name for a product I have ever seen (the name of the business is kept secret for obvious reasons)! They are a butcher and sell meat products. Naming a product “55 Pound Lamb Carcass” may be factual BUT I wonder how much it improves sales…:) I especially like the fact that they talk about dead sheep and then put a picture of the little wooly lamb next to it!

The other end of the bad naming concept spectrum is someone who has a great concept but does not name their product or even set the parameters for what it entails. There is a woman in my networking group who has gotten SO much better. Before she talked about how she sold “happiness” and “feeling good”. That IS focusing on the benefits of her products BUT we had no idea what-so-ever what she was actually selling! Now she is actually saying what her product is and I have to think that she will sell more of them!

So your homework today is to:

1. Make sure you have named your product or service
2. Check that it is not an icky or offensive name
3. Confirm that other humans can understand what you are selling even if they do not know about you
4. Then sell, sell, sell!

Click here if you would like to find out a little more about features versus benefits…

Related posts:

1. Small Business Marketing – Are You Selling The Steak Or The Sizzle?
2. Features Versus Benefits Part Deux
3. Small Business Marketing Say EXACTLY What You Are Selling

When I think about niche marketing I am as hesitant as the next person to eliminate any potential customers BUT it is totally necessary! If you try and please everyone, you will ultimately please no one and will have a hard time succeeding. So, what causes me to make that terribly bold statement?

Yesterday I was at a networking group with a copywriter who had just visited our group for the first time. She asked if she could bounce one of her products off of us and we said of course! She then proceeded to say that she was offering to review any communications that we would send out including emails, blog posts and marketing materials, making sure that they were grammatically and visually correct. Huh. Well anyone who reads this blog knows that is NOT a top priority for me…sigh. Just the other day I sent out a message that said my Free Website Class was being held on February 32nd.

Now don’t get me wrong! I am as driven to provide great information and content as the next gal, BUT being perfect all of the time is not one of my main goals. That having been said, Joy (my friend the Denver Bookkeeper) sitting next to me was thrilled that someone would help her make sure that everything went out right. Gotta say, I WANT my bookkeeper or my accountant or my lawyer to have a higher level of persnickity-ness about their communications than my marketer or my hairdresser.

I work on volume and if I had to have someone review every one of the 100′s of blog posts or articles or emails I do a year, my reach would go down and I would not have the level of success I enjoy now. That having been said, she could definitely have a great client base if she were to focus on providing service for people who ARE worried about doing things perfectly. Joy would be a great client, a doctor would be a great client, anyone who is in a professional industry probably shares some of that same fear of sending out a “bad” communication!

Yet still she tried to convince me that I was wrong and that I should be more concerned.

You CAN NOT convince someone to buy your product or service without A LOT work. She would do better to focus on providing great products and services to a smaller group of people who are receptive to hearing her message. This is niche marketing at its finest!

Now I am not picking on the new copywriter only…I talk to a lot of realtors every month and the first thing I ask them is who they work with – buyers or sellers, condo owners or single family homeowners, first time homebuyers or move up buyers. Invariably, most of them say ANYONE! Anyone who can fog a mirror is a potential client. ARGGGG. If they would just make a stand and concentrate on some kind of niche, they could do so much more and achieve even more success.

My niche market is working with small business owners, entrepreneurs and realtors on their marketing needs. I know FOR SURE who my target market is, so reaching them becomes easier than if I said that ANY company in the world is my potential prospect.

Please do not feel that choosing a niche eliminates anyone else. I do work with larger companies which have a more entrepreneurial spirit or who have a real connection to who I am or what I do BUT that is my choice. Day to day I am blessed to work with dynamic, interesting and sometimes chaotic entrepreneurial souls who are making a difference in the world!

Related posts:

1. Niche Marketing IS My Niche! – How I Started
2. Niche Marketing and Customer Service Go Hand In Hand
3. Niche Marketing – Business Writing, Ink.

There are some really new things happening like google buzz and gist which could be a great way to keep up with your contacts and what they are doing across Facebook, Twitter and their blogs. Warning, if you want the world to be the way it was 20 years ago and not have to continually learn, change and figue out new technologies this is NOT the post for you!

GOOGLE BUZZ

Google Buzz is here (just FYI I didn’t know it even existed until 2 days ago so you are not very far behind the curve…:) What I have found it to be thus far is an incorporation between my google contacts and my gmail in conjunction with their blog posts and twitter tweets and more. It showed up as a little button below my Inbox. Now I did request to be added to it so I am not sure if it would have just showed up anyways or not – just in case here is a link to Google Buzz.

The way that google finds these items to post is by searching what you have entered in your google profile so make sure that your blogs, facebook and twitter accounts are up to date!

I will do a more in depth post on this alone once I understand what it is BUT there is always a first responder advantage so get signed up and worry about the rest later!!!

GIST

This seems like it could be really neat…or a huge waste of time! Basically what it is is a way to load all of your favorite people’s social networking and blog stuff into one place and then be able to keep up with them all at once across platforms. That having been said, it seems like it might take A LOT of time getting all that stuff loaded in initially. I think if it catches on A BUNCH then eventually other people will load their own stuff and you won’t have to do it BUT there are not that many people preloaded now.

I am going to write about the benefits of being first to market on Monday so make sure to check back!

Related posts:

1. New Google Search Features and What They Mean
2. Social Networking Will Replace Google?
3. Taking Advantage Of Trends On Google

What is the purpose of an Superbowl advertisement? Is is branding, comedy or SALES? It is my understanding that all advertisements are supposed to generate twice as much revenue as they cost and at the very least should be able to pay for themselves with sales. Here is a VERY subjective look at Superbowl ads old and new and their sales effectiveness.

According to CNN Money, the 2010 super bowl ads cost “a record $2.6 million for a 30-second spot”. Add that to the approximately 1 million dollars it takes to produce the ad. That is a tremendous amount of money to have to recoup with sales and it doesn’t even touch what companies like Dorito’s and Papa Johns paid to be official sponsors of the event.

The other consideration is whether the ad is effective for just men or just women. At halftime my husband’s favorite ads where the Snickers where they slammed Betty White into a puddle and also the Doritos bark collar. I liked the irony of Oprah, Jay and Dave sitting together having a terrible Superbowl party BUT that is totally branding AND you have to know a lot of back story to have it make sense. That having been said, to people who DO pay attention it was worth a chuckle. I also like the ongoing Budweiser ads with the Clydesdales although this years was just okay.

I have been VERY disappointed with the ads and was particularly grouchy about one that had people flipping around in a pool like dolphins. REALLY? You are a Madison Avenue ad firm with a million dollar budget and the ability to do ANYTHING and you come up with slog like that?!?!!?

My Husband’s favorite commercial of all time is far and away the Nissan pigeons. We had a little talk about the effectiveness of the ad since he has never bought a Nissan, but John contends that it is a success because he talks about that commercial years later. He also thinks that paying this much attention to commercials is stupid, but that is a post for another day…:)

I don’t care what anyone says…I LOVED Pets.com and they were around just about the time that Stanley Brown Dog was a puppy so I have to say that single handed-ly tried to purchase enough new toys to keep them in business!! That having been said, having a business model that effectively loses money while spending gagillions on advertising may not be the exact way to go.

The Apple Computer Ad 1984 is my all time favorite commercial and the very first time that I remember noticing advertising as something I liked to study! It was directed by Ridley Scott and has set the bar pretty high for the competition. There IS something to be said for the fact that I did not purchase an Apple product until a couple of years ago – was it actually effective or just neat?

Related posts:

1. Customer Demographics and Super Bowl Commercials

I have to admit, I digg my own site! Because of how we build our blogs, at the bottom of each post is a little button that says “Tell and Share” which allows me to fly through submitting my post to all sorts of bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Delicious and Google Bookmarking.

Sharing my posts this way has a couple of great consequences including site traffic and people who follow my suggestions. Because I am sharing my blog posts on these bookmarking services I get between 30 and 50 free hits each time I post.

Now a word of caution! If you just start bookmarking today, you will probably NOT get that kind of response. I have been bookmarking for close to a year so I have friends and followers of my bookmarks just like you would have on Facebook or Twitter. Because I always suggest quality content (mine and other people’s), they can feel confident that if I recommend a link it is going to be informative.

So what are your thoughts? Should you bookmark your own posts or is there some sort of bookmarking etiquette that I am violating?

Marketing Artfully members – this week’s “free” post is about how to be deliberate about bookmarking and growing your bookmarking following!

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