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Hi there,

After much deliberation I've decided to take the plunge and move my blog over to WordPress. Lots of great features and the ability to edit more readily are the main reasons I'm switching - please follow my blog over to this address:

Small Business Marketing Mavericks

See you there!
Caroline

Online Newspaper Sites are Great for Local Small Businesses

One of the things that has been tough in the past couple of years for small business owners is the fact that print newspapers are declining in popularity and readership and have become less effective in driving new customers to your location or service business.

People haven't stopped reading the news - they are just getting their news in a different format - which is evident in the growing percentages of people reading online newspapers.

I love online newspapers as a vehicle for small businesses to use to promote their products and services. Why? Because it combines my 2 favorite advertising ingredients - you are able to target your message and you are able to track your results and measure your success - two key factors of any advertising campaign a small business embarks upon.

Check out this info posted by Kristina Knight in yesterday's Biz Report for more stats on the popularity of online news sites.

clipped from www.bizreport.com Online marketers looking for a new demographic don't need to travel far and wide. They simply need to visit - and advertise with - a newspaper website. Why? Because newspaper readers are more likely to shop, research and interact online. And because the audience for newspaper websites is growing at nearly twice the rate of the general Internet audience. According to figures from the Newspaper Association of America, more than 59 million users or 39% of the general Internet population visited newspaper websites during each month of the first quarter. That is a 5% increase over newspaper web traffic during Q1, 2006. During the same time period, the general online audience grew only about 2%. With their proclivity to shop, research and read online, newspaper website visitors are clearly a good group for advertisers to target.

Small Business Survey Results Released

According to the OPEN Ages Survey from OPEN from American Express, Boomers have more energy than members of "Generation Y" - check out the small business survey here for more surprising findings as well!

clipped from biz.yahoo.com First Major Survey on Gen Y and Boomer Entrepreneurs Shows Business Confidence and Different Appetites for Risk Gen Y More Passionate but Baby Boomers More Energetic In a Head-to-Head Match-Up Generations Agree Experience Gives Boomers the Advantage; "Small businesses are responsible for 60 to 80 percent of the net new U.S. jobs created annually over the past decade," said Susan Sobbott, president, OPEN from American Express. "It is good news for the economy when both the established generation and the generation representing the future of small business are optimistic about economic growth and their own success."

5 Make-or-Break Tactics to Help the Search Engines Find Your Small Business

Choosing effective small business keywords can be an intimidating task. Everyone knows that going to search for anything on a major search engine like Google can often return thousands of results. But does that mean defeat for your local small business? No!

There are a lot of things that can be done to get your local Web site noticed by your local customer base. Five of those techniques are invaluable in guiding you to success.

1. Use Phrases
Phrases can make a world of a difference in what can be found through search engines. Type in any single word and you’re bound to find literally thousands of results. Type in specific phrases and the results not only drastically decrease, but they become much more relevant.

For instance, a search on Google for “renovation” can bring back over 32 million listings. However, a listing for “bathroom renovation” can return less than 200,000. A search for “software” can return more than a billion results. A search for “custom accounting software” gets barely twenty-five thousand.

Many times people know what it is they’re looking for and can get fairly specific with their searches. However, if your local small business site isn’t geared to take advantage of that, it will either be lost in millions of listings or excluded from your customer’s more specific searches altogether.

2. Include Location References
Because you’re aiming to reach your local audience, including location references when choosing your small business keywords can also work well. This can mean including your specific city, metro area, well-known landmarks or even surrounding cities that you commonly provide services to.

By doing this, you accomplish two very different tasks. For one, you make your site known to the people who matter most to you. You can be found by your customers looking for you in their own location. But there’s an additional advantage to this.

When you include locations in your keywords, you eliminate a lot of unnecessary communication. With the abundance of people searching for products you may be offering, there’s no limit to how many customers you can’t help that may contact you for information. By including location, they know who you’re working for and can move on to companies that are less focused.

3. Communicate with Your Customers
As with all business choices, communication is absolutely important. If you come up with keywords that make sense to your industry as a whole, but aren’t words your common customers would use, you have failed.

Customers aren’t always in tune with the proper terminology of your industry. You would do well to interact often with your customers and find out how they refer to the products and services you offer in your own personal business.

This can be done when they’re in your store. It can also be done through surveys. Contacting your customers, explaining that you’re simply trying to better serve them by learning how they view your products and getting them to respond in their own terminology can give you a strong advantage in keyword advertising – with the added bonus of letting your customers know you really value their input!

While other companies may be reaching out to them just as vehemently as you are, you can sprint ahead of the competition by making your local small business easier to find according to your customer’s standards.

4. Use Honesty
A huge mistake many companies make when choosing their small business keywords, is to draw people in dishonestly. Often, they’ll find out keywords that are very popular and try to jump through hoops to tie those words to their own products. This is not good business!

Instead, offer what you have according to honest keywords. You don’t just want to draw anyone and everyone that uses the Internet. You want to draw customers that really are looking for your services.

It is said by some that people who are dissatisfied with a company spread their feelings 10 times more than those who are content. If you begin to draw anyone and everyone you can pointlessly to your site, you will eventually have a large amount of people who have a simple distaste for you before they even know anything about your company.

5. Continually Reevaluate
Finally, you must recognize that language is organic. It is continually changing for a multitude of reasons. Keywords, key focuses, key everything changes based on fads, slang, trends, needs, and so on. You must continually check on how your keywords are performing.

Once you’ve found a set of keywords that work well for you, it would be good practice to reevaluate them about once a month. Check to see the popularity of those words and phrases. See if they’re no longer being used or if they’re typically being applied to something irrelevant to your company.

Your local small business is absolutely important to you. In today’s information age, your Web site can be equally important to your customers. If they cannot find it, you’re inevitably going to miss out on business you otherwise would have had.

There are other tips for choosing keywords, but they’re negligible compared to those mentioned here. If you want to be seen, you must remember to use phrases and location references. If you want to be seen by the most relevant customers, you’ll need to communicate with them and be honest. And finally, you must always remember that language changes – as do preferences - and you have to be able to change with it.

Caroline

Branding or Marketing - Which Should You Choose for Your Small Business?

Marketing vs. Branding - Which Should You Choose?

A lot of marketers make a lot of noise about the importance of branding to your small business. In fact, many small business owners have focused their marketing budgets so exclusively on branding by following this advice, they've failed to see results to their bottom line.

One of my small business clients was coached by their former agency to develop an elaborate branding campaign, including custom photography for their materials. At a cost of over $8,000, they had some very beautiful looking materials that did absolutely nothing to drive new customers to their location or to increase their sales.

According to marketing consultant Russell Kern, "as brand content increases, response rates decline."

In his study, his findings showed that "when offer copy in direct response promotions shifts to lower than 90% (with 10% brand messaging), decreased response rates cause the cost per sale to increase, on average, tenfold or more."

The small business bottom line: Focus your marketing dollars on activities that truly provide solid ROI for your business. Keep the 90/10 Rule in mind when it comes to marketing (your offer for your products and services) vs. branding.


Source: Target Marketing, April, 2007, page 19.

Why Small Businesses Need to Embrace Social Media

Caught this todayfrom Alain Thys's post on Marketing Profs regarding the importance of Web 2.0 - a.k.a. social media - on marketing relating to "brands" - it only serves to highlight the importance of a web presence for every small business looking to succeed.

When anyone can post anything about anybody - anywhere and any time, you as the marketer of your business are no longer in control of the conversation. If you have no web presence, you have no voice to influence the conversation about your business that may be going on online.

Embrace social media and embrace the future!

Caroline

clipped from www.mpdailyfix.com Social Media Participation is Not Optional for Brands For traditional marketers this is worse than a nightmare. In the old days, you could still control a conversation by throwing enough money at it or outsmarting the media. I remember tactically forgetting to appear on the evening news in the middle of a PR crisis. Then, 24 hours later the media had moved on, and so did the water-cooler conversations. Faced with the same crisis on the Web today, I'd need to blog, write and influence my heart out to contain the message. And even if I was especially fast, truthful and professional about it, I would probably fail because Google footprints cannot be erased. That is why - in my opinion - anyone involved in sales or marketing has no other option but to accept the social media reality and manage every contact as if they were the editor-in-chief of the WSJ himself.

Google Alerts for Your Small Business

One of the neatest ways to keep track of what's being said about you and your small business online is to use Google Alerts. You simply put in terms that you want Google to alert you about - and then determine how often you'd like to be alerted.

I use Google Alerts to track where my company name is being mentioned online, as well as my website and my own personal name. This allows me not only to find out where my marketing is being most effective (press release and article sites that Google crawls frequently) - it would also alert me if someone where saying something "not so nice" about me too, and give me the chance to do something about it.

You can set Google to alert you "as it happens" or on a once-a-day basis. You'll receive an e-mail with all of the mentions of your specified terms online.

One thing I noticed recently was that my Google Alerts had seemed to stop coming. I knew this was odd because I know my company has been mentioned (positively!) in many places online - but also because even if Google weren't picking up links to my site it should be picking up links for the generic terms I have alerts set for such as "internet marketing" for example.

I went in to my Google Alerts account and deleted - then re-scheduled - all of my alerts, and that seems to have done the trick.

Check out Google Alerts and keep track of your small business name online!

Caroline