Small Business Marketing | Marketing for Entrepreneurs | Realtor Marketing » internet marketing

Small Business Marketing – Telling The What But Selling The How

Tara Jacobsen — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 14:38:49 +0000

Small business marketing is all about SELLING a product or service that people have a need for, unfortunately most people on the internet are looking for free and easy. That is why we tell most of our clients to be free and loose with the WHAT and sell for access to the HOW.

Small Business Marketing – Telling The What

I was talking with a client the other day and he was worried that having a blog and talking about his business and the intellectual property was hurting the chances to SELL something.

The funny part of this is that we had just gotten done talking about how great the response was from some of the recent things we posted – TRUE business opportunities!

In this day and age of instant access to whatever your heart desires, it can feel like selling anything via the internet is a lost cause. “Buyers” are looking for money for nothing and the clicks for free. That having been said, I have found that there are 3 types of “buyers” on the internet:

People who want information for nothing – These types were never going to buy and if you help them great.
People who want information and want to do it themselves – These types are good for a membership site or to get signed up for a seminar or class.
People who want information to make an informed buying decision – BINGO! These people are checking out what and how you say things in anticipation of working with you or buying your product in the future and are the ones that we should focus on.

If you dumb your stuff down so far that you are not giving away anything, the chances of anyone noticing you is slim. It is much better to share too much and then have a rock-solid plan for monetizing that traffic or audience which brings me to…

Small Business Marketing – Selling The How

If you are a reader of this blog or have attended one of my live free events, you will hear me say often, “give your best stuff away”! For me that means telling people in the room the one neat thing that I found that works great or the couple of key things to do that will increase their business. This goes back to my three types of buyers above, the ones that were never going to buy still will not BUT the ones that are cruising for real help will definitely get their ears up if they think I know something REAL that can help their business.

Additionally, I will often tell you exactly what you should do, sometimes in EXCRUCIATING (to you) detail. I know as I am writing when I have crossed a line – when I tell you HOW to do it. That takes away from potential sales to my membership site or small business services company. For my client above, telling them what real estate markets to target is fine, telling them what types of investments are good is fine, posting how to buy them (or even find them) without him in the middle somewhere is less than fine!

So, long story short (too late I know)! For your small business marketing efforts, make sure they are in this order:

Sell something you like and are knowledgeable about
Get crystal clear about what product or service you are going to sell
Share your knowledge about your industry and make sure you have calls to action to purchase your product or service

To find out more, check out our Small Business Marketing Services or DIY Small Business Marketing Membership Site.

Website and Blog Design – The Wrong Things

Tara Jacobsen — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:10:33 +0000

When small business owners having a website or blog designed, they are all happy and ready to start. They have been thinking about this for while and know just what colors and fonts they want. Sigh.

Website and Blog Design – So What Are The Wrong Things?

Looks – Looks are important…BUT! Spending time on getting the right color purple font is a terrible waste of time. Websites and blogs should be about usability. Having snazzy fonts and colors makes it harder to read.
Fancy Flash or Movie Intros – Making users click through a landing page with a “skip intro” button is a waste of time and money AND confuses the search engines.
Picking A Fun URL – Your website should be easy to find online. Having a “fun” URL like WhizzyWigsAnDooDads.com will be fun to market, but will not help you in the search engines. Nor will having your company name. I bet you will rank well for that even if you do not try all that hard since hardly anyone else will be competing with you!

Website and Blog Design – So What Are The RIGHT Things?

Good Solid Design – You want a site that looks professional and which directs people to where you want them to go (like your products or services page).
Easy To Use Navigation – Having tons of different things for people to do is distracting. You should be able to tell at a glance what you want your users to do when they land on your page. They should also have an easy way to get to the subpages of your site. Generally, it is good to use the same words that everyone else does – not creative but effective!
Readable Pages – DO NOT have too much text on the page. Break it up with pictures and headings.
Great Content – Today there is nothing more important than having great content that internet users are looking for. They do not care what solutions you offer or any other industry buzzwords, they just want answers to their questions.
Keyword Research – This is the most important one! You can have the most beautiful site on the internet, but if no one can find you on the search engines it will not matter. Make sure to target keywords with high searches and low competition!
A Good Searchable URL – This is the second most important! If you name your site www.LakewoodBookkeepingAccounting.com, it will not be as fun to market, but it sure will rank better for important keywords don’t you think?

So if you are considering having a website or blog designed, make sure you are more concerned with things that matter than what it looks like! AND if you designer won’t have these hard conversations with you, you may wind up with a great looking site that no one ever sees!

Online Marketing – Internet Leads ARE Real Leads

Tara Jacobsen — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:35:23 +0000

I am just going to say this once, online leads are REAL leads! Not all of them, but enough to make your online marketing efforts worthwhile. Today I thought I would share some success stories with you.

I spend most of my day working on and looking at the internet. I talk with small business owners, marketers and Realtors about how their online efforts are working. Oftentimes I hear that internet leads are somehow worse than other leads. Off the top of my head…

One of my business pals Stacy Hansen, specializing in Clearwater internet marketing, throws off the term “oh they messaged me on Facebook” like it happens everyday. And for her, sometimes it does!
One of my Realtor buddies had her agents look at where their “A” buyers were coming from and at least 60% were “internet leads”.
A customer got a message this morning that EXACTLY matches what he does as an inquiry. NOW, will that turn into business? It might.
Colorado garage door guy, Rick Smith, gets requests for quotes about once a week.

The list could go on and on BUT what I want you to consider is the effort and money that goes into these leads. A blog was set up, they do a regular post about once a week, and they answer those leads promptly. Where else can you get generally free leads?

Do you have to wade through people who sent in a form but really didn’t want to be contacted? Sometimes. Do you get spam from people who promise to get you to the top of the search engines? Probably. But really, what do you have to lose except a little time and some optimism that it will work!

Do URL Keywords REALLY Matter Much To Google?

Tara Jacobsen — Wed, 19 May 2010 12:42:14 +0000

Does using URL keywords help drive organic traffic from google and other search engines is on my mind today. The URL keywords efficiency at getting google to notice a website is controversial but REALLY interesting.

The URL Keyword Controversy is a big deal in my world, probably not so much in yours BUT it does affect your online business empire! The URL (or Domain Name) keyword question is about whether using keywords in your domain name would increase your ranking in google and other search engines. So instead of picking www.abccompany.com you would pick www.wesellwidgets.com.

We have many clients who are adamant that they want to use their business name as their domain name for their blog (check out more information about the difference between blogs and websites). We have even had prospects that have sent us pages long emails about why we are nuts for trying to steer them towards using keywords in the web name where they host their blog instead of having their company name.

Well, if you think that having search engine keywords in your domain name helps, then using your company name as a your blog URL is silly. Since lots of people are looking to buy widgets or whatever you are selling and few people are searching for your company name, naming your URL your company name is counter productive. Here is a video from Matt Cutts (the google guy) who says that keywords in the domain name do help a little bit. Well, I will tell you, I will take every advantage I can get for my clients.

Additionally, it has been proven anecdotally over time with our clients. If we name a website www.HomesForSaleVictorvilleCA.com, they will rank for on page one for that common search term (there are over 30,000 searches for that term a month and over 173,000 search results to compete with) so why wouldn’t you do that instead of using the Realtor’s name which does not have enough search volume to register. I also have a colleague who got traffic and leads from an intervention steps website with a good keywordy url that did not have any backlinks or anything else to help promote it, so more evidence from a third party even!

Just as an aside, that does NOT mean that I think you should use a long, convoluted URL like http://bestrestauranttampabay.com for your marketing pieces, OF COURSE you will buy a good url like www.SnookersBlog.com and POINT it at your Best Restaurant Tampa Bay keywordy URL. BUT to google, since you actually built the blog or website on the good keywords you get a little bonus!

To muddy the waters a bit more, here are some somewhat supporting and contrasting posts from google about the benefits of having keywords in the URL:

Outsourcing Marketing Do Inane Comments and Spam Work

Tara Jacobsen — Tue, 11 May 2010 14:19:01 +0000

Outsourcing is a great way to leverage yourself. Hiring a company or people to help is often the only way to advance your business beyond what you are capable of doing time wise or talent wise. BUT do inane comments and spam emails REALLY work?

I had a problem with my site this weekend and as a result my comment spam filter is not working. BOY do you get a new look at what is going on with the comments when you actually have to see all the people who are posting links to pharmaceuticals, organ enhancements and the like. That having been said, I saw an interesting one today. It was a bland comment like “I totally agree with everything you said”, the email link was an SEO company and the link went to a virginia beach roofing company website. Obviously they were attempting to get backlinks to their clients’ website.

OUTSOURCING INANE COMMENTS

HUH, it is disconcerting that an SEO company doesn’t know that most wordpress comment sections do not allow backlinks. You have to ADD a plugin to remove the no follow attributes for the comments and I know very few blogs that take that step. So WHY do we recommend that you make comments at all? If you add a relevant note with some thought behind it, humans will read that information and follow your link back to your website where you could get them to do something like sign up for your newsletter or buy something. Additionally, we always make our blogs so someone has to approve the comments before they are posted so that spammy link will never see the light of day anyways. Outsourcing at its finest for sure.

When you hire a quality internet marketing business to represent you, you may not get reports that a million links were attempted. You may not have a ton of new boucing traffic BUT you will have people who think you are a valid, reputable company with a brain in your head.

to note: the roofing company has no page rank, 1 incoming link and no discernible traffic

BAD OUTSOURCING – SPAM SEO EMAILS

So I am cc’d on email leads that my clients get so that I can make any changes that come up when a site launches based on feedback so I see a bunch of different websites’ contact us forms. Almost all of them got an email this week that said “We are interested to increase traffic to your website, please get back to us in order to discuss the possibility in further detail.” They also get ones that say they will get them on the first page of google and a date with George Clooney (okay I made up that last one but you get the picture).

Do you really think a company that sends out poorly written spam emails is the right company to represent you? Getting page ranking, building social networks and building a loyal following take time and energy. There is no magic pill people!!!!

If you are considering outsourcing marketing, Marketing Artfully works with two great companies that do good work for their clients on Social Media Marketing and overall internet marketing deployments. We have worked with Stacy Hansen of Personalized Marketing Corp for over 10 years and are proud to recommend her for helping to manage your entire internet package. Amber Montel of Your Marketing Voice is superb at helping you to build up your social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Blogging How to find something to write about everyday

Tara Jacobsen — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:36:15 +0000

How to find something to write about when you are blogging is the number one question I get from our clients. Here are my Top 10 Ways To Find Something To Write About!

So what is the best way to overcome this almost daily bout of writers block and get some content up there on the interwebs? Here are my Top 10 Kick Me In The Pants and Make Me Write Something For Goodness Sakes ideas…

Top 10 Ways To Find Something To Write About

Subscribe to newsletters – oftentimes all it takes to get me writing a blog post is to read something I like or hate by another writer. Now do not get me wrong, I never copy and always give attributions BUT I can jump off that idea and start a post of my own!
Subscribe to feed readers – I use iGoogle to keep track of my favorite bloggers (do not worry Seth, you are always top left). Just seeing a title can give me an idea.
Subscribe to google alerts – use the power of google to send you a digest of what has been written about the previous day.
Check out twitter trending topics – if people are talking about it, it must be in vogue, jump on that bandwagon and get a great keyworded post out there.
Check out what people are talking about on Facebook – I have to tell you, between Twitter and Facebook, I have found some of my most recent, favorite things to use!
Ask your friends and followers online what they are interested in – you can just ask outright on social networks or get a surveymonkey.com going and laser target it.
Pick a theme for the month – with a theme everything becomes easier, your research, your writing and ranking for that keyword in google.
Listen to humans – when you go out and talk to humans, many times they will all ask you the same questions. Pay attention to what they are and “answer” them on your blog!
FAVORITE – Dink around! Give yourself permission to spend a day or even an hour dinking around on the interwebs. It is really easy to get so focused that you are not learning or growing.
FAVORITE – Check your google analytics Right there in the keywords people used to get to your website through google is a list of topics that they are interested in and which you have to be ranking somewhat high on google.

So, enough already! Get over your writers block and try some of these out for more than five minutes and I bet you will get your creative juices flowing again.

Small Business Marketing Burnout and Failure

Tara Jacobsen — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 13:39:06 +0000

Small business marketing burnout and failure is not EXACTLY the most uplifting topic ever, but I think it is important to talk about the fact that NO ONE gets everything done and what steps we can take to do better.

When I get frustrated with MY small business marketing I feel like a 10 year old kid who just wants to put her head under the covers and just MAKE IT ALL GO AWAY! Very mature I know, but it is what it is.

So let us talk about small business marketing failure first

I have failed miserably and gloriously at some of my marketing efforts (the mid 2000′s spammy email list debacle comes to mind first). The thing to remember though is that I have TRIED lots of marketing things too and some of them have succeeded.

I know that there are some things I do better at than others marketing-wise. I am TERRIBLE phone caller, sigh. I wish that was not so, but making a marketing plan that drives people to pick up the phone and call me is money flushed down the drain.

I know that I like doing online marketing and that I can measure the results with google analytics SOOO I do more online marketing and plump up the places that send me traffic.

Take a look at your marketing that is failing and either fix it OR ditch it. DO NOT spend one more dime on marketing that is not working without a plan!

Small business marketing burnout

I have a list of HUNDREDS of things I should be doing right now that I am not, which also makes me feel like a failure. When I get to this point, two things HAVE to happen:

I have to make my list smaller. I do not know anyone who has ever gotten through their whole list of things to do, it is just not possible SOOOO I need to make a smaller list. There is not enough time in the day to do everything so there have to be fewer things.
I have to focus my list. Take out your list of things to do or if they are in your head write them down now. Now look at them realistically (I HATE this part). How much can you actually do today…next week…this year. Which ones will drive money to your bank account soon? Do those first, even if they are the hardest or the ones that you do not know how to do!

What if you fall off the wagon?

So you are cruising along doing your marketing and then work happens. You do not post to your blog for two weeks, you do not email your list for a month, you do not send your quarterly newsletter, you stop calling your customers. ARGGGG

First off, they probably did not notice since work is happening to them too! And Second off, just start doing it again today. No apologies, no long winded explanations, just get back out there and start all over again. One day at a time baby, one day at a time.

I am going to be doing my two hour small business marketing consults for $100 until June first when the price will be going up to $250. If you would like to get on calendar to talk, email me soon (tara@marketingartfully.com) to save your place.

Clearwater Local Internet Marketing For Tampa Bay

Tara Jacobsen — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:22:10 +0000

If you are looking for Tampa Bay and Clearwater local internet marketing, you can not do better than Personalized Marketing! Helping you understand and utilize website and blog design, social media marketing, video marketing or email communications for your business.

Stacy Hansen is really taking the internet marketing marketing world by storm and her clients are the ones benefiting from it! So what kinds of services does Stacy offer and why should you consider adding them to your business whether you hire Stacy or not!

Website and blog design – Stacy works with us to help get your blog off of the ground the RIGHT WAY!
Social media and networking – Facebook and Twitter are great ways to market your business and your blog! She will help you market goods and services through these powerful marketing medium.
YouTube Videos – Video marketing is one of the emerging forms of marketing and you can get your business on the cutting edge and take over market share!
Email Marketing – When you maintain regular contact with your client via email your sales and leads WILL increase!

Improving your business leads and sales with a blog, video marketing or email campaigns can make all the difference in your business’ success, especially in this more challenging business climate. I cannot say it enough, market share you gain now will not go away when the market turns again!

If you would like to find out more about your Clearwater local internet marketing options for the Tampa Bay, Marketing Artfully works closely with Personalized Marketing to provide the highest quality internet marketing solutions for your business!

Stacy Hansen
Personalized Marketing

http://personalizedmarketingcorp.com

727-505-5384

Entrepreneur Marketing The iPad Is Coming

Tara Jacobsen — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:35:34 +0000

The fact that the iPad is coming is HUGE for entrepreneur and small business marketing! If you think this is not going to change everything then you have not been paying attention to the popularity of the iPhone, the Android and other smart phones.

Gary Vaynerchuk of Crush It fame, talked today about how every company should use their advertising to drive people online and how video blogs will get even more popular as a marketing channel.

The iPad and Advertising

How cool will it be when you can pay to advertise in a magazine and instead of having to drive people to the web, they are already there! They can click a link or a picture or video and go right to your information or sales page.

For a while now I have hesitated to pay for marketing offline unless there was a truly targeted audience. Many times they tell me how they can drive people to their website and my readership is higher than theirs!

Now don’t get me wrong, your local offline papers and advertising venues will probably not be able to mimic the capabilities of new snazzy marketing outlets like what the New York Times will, but it will be fun to see the new opportunities.

Email Marketing and the iPad

There are lots of times that I do not click through links when I am reading my email on my smart phone (I use the iPhone). That is because the websites are teeny and I am getting old and can not see as well as I used to. Having a normal-ish sized screen should make that process a little better and encourage me to send more emails with links (perhaps to YouTube videos or back to my site to see videos).

This will make sending those pretty HTML emails more important than ever! If you are not using a service like Constant Contact or Aweber for small business or Brokers Helper or My Red Tools for realtors, start now and get ahead of the learning curve and beat your competition.

iPad and Reach

If nothing else today, I want you (my loyal readers) to start thinking more about the new possibilities that the iPad is going to bring to small business and entrepreneur marketing! We have a couple of months to get our marketing houses in order before the WiFi iPads come out and we should be taking that time to figure out how to capitalize on it before our competitors do! The wiki about the iPhone says that there have been over 21 MILLION iPhones sold and that does not count all the other smart phone sales.

So what to do?

Learn to make videos – Use either jingproject.com or camtasia.com for screen capture and buy a flip camera or use your phone. Do a video today and post it on You Tube. Even if it is dumb. Even if you don’t know what to say. Just doing it over and over will make you better at it AND do not worry that it is not perfect, we do not want perfect anymore, we want REAL!
Get an email list database that has HTML capabilities – I recommend Constant Contact for almost all of my non-internet marketing only clients. Learn to embed videos or pictures that link to your videos in your emails.
Stop being overwhelmed or confused – This is the big one! I see many of my clients who are stuck, just standing still watching the world go by as technology streams past. If you can do it, learn it today. If you can not, call me and I will recommend GREAT companies that can do it for you. It will not be free BUT it will be better than watching your business fade into obscurity!

There are affiliate links in this post that will pay me a little bit of money if you click on them. If you would like to avoid my getting a little bit of money, please type in the emails manually.

Internet Marketing Keyword and Product Names

Tara Jacobsen — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:43:47 +0000

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.