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Small Business Success Index

Index Score*   Grade
75 marginal
Capital Access 67
Marketing & Innovation 70
Workforce 79
Customer Service 91
Computer Technology 74
Compliance 90
*Index score is calculated on a 1-100 scale.
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Search Articles

Marketing Articles


I Love You, You Love Me: Customer Service Gets High Marks from SBSI

March 1st, 2010 :: Monika Jansen

In case you missed my last blog post, Marketing, the Small Business Success Index, and You, I wrote about the C- score that marketing and innovation earned in the Small Business Success Index survey that was conducted by Network Solutions and the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. The index was released on February 16 and is designed to track the competitive health of the small business sector over time.  Scores in 6 categories are graded; customer service, something that is near and dear (or should be) to marketing folks, scored an A-.

The major strength of small business is in customer service, with the great majority of businesses reporting success in all six areas that comprise this component of the SBSI. 

In all honesty, this did not surprise me at all.  High-quality customer service is a differentiator that small business owners embrace.  In this age of faceless technology, we all crave a personal transaction.   Automated phone menus, customer service departments on the other side of the world staffed by people who are not empowered to make decisions, and multi-national corporations that don’t even post a customer service phone number on their website create nothing but negative feelings and poor experiences.  And we all know how eager people are to share a bad customer service experience.

From Captain Camera on FlickrCase in point: I decided to save a little money, bypass Sephora, and buy mascara at CVS.  I saw an ad for L’Oreal’s Extra Volume Collagen Mascara in InStyle Magazine.  Just the thing my skimpy little lashes need, I thought.  The mascara was flaky and clumpy, and it looked terrible.  Since I couldn’t find the CVS receipt, I decided to contact L’Oreal’s customer service department via email to see if I could get a voucher or coupon. L’Oreal is a massive company; they own 21 other skincare, cosmetics, fragrance, and hair care brands.  Long story short, you can’t email them, but you can waste your time in a chat session with an Online Beauty Advisor.  Turns out you are not chatting with a person, you are chatting with a computer.  The computer could not understand what I was telling it, so I gave up.  I have zero patience with adults, less with technology, and I hate wasting time.  Now I shop for mascara—and all other cosmetics—exclusively at Sephora.

Around nine out of ten small businesses are highly successful at answering customer questions, ensuring customer satisfaction, showing empathy, providing consistent service, resolving problems and winning repeat business. 

And that quote perfectly illustrates what makes us small businesses so special:

Successful at answering customer questions: Because many of us are the business, we know all of our clients personally, and we certainly know our products and/or services intimately. 

Ensuring customer satisfaction: We work hard to make our clients are happy, whether it’s quick turnaround on a project, special pricing based on their loyalty, or a gift card to a favorite shop or café just to say thanks, you are valuable to me.

Showing empathy:  We’re not robots, computers, or customer service reps who don’t give a damn.  We care, and we show it.

Providing consistent service:  When you go out to eat, you never know what kind of server you might get stuck with: a veteran or a newbie.  Our clients know what to expect from us.    

Resolving problems: If there’s a problem in the middle of a project, our clients can reach us directly by phone, text, or email.  We can immediately start working on resolving the issue.   

Winning repeat service: It’s a lot of work to look for new vendors or partners.  If we do a good job the first time, our clients will come back and recommend us.

Great FREE SEO Tools for Your Small Business

February 26th, 2010 :: Steven Fisher

As we come to the end of this month, what better way to wrap up this month’s theme of “Getting Your Business Found” than giving away free stuff. Well, free advice and content at least. A few months ago I came across this article of great SEO tools that are free written by Mark Thompson over at Web Analytics World. You can use them for link research, SEO, social media and analytics.

Here is the article list:

1. SEO Toolbar

This is by far the best SEO tool out there. No matter what client or industry I am researching, I always start with the data provided by the SEO Toolbar. It will give you a snapshot of a site, by providing high level information search engines analyze when ranking websites. Even though the toolbar will give you lots of different data points, there are only certain things I look at. I look at the follow data to get a basic overview of the site.

  • Domain Age
  • Inbound Links
  • PageRank
  • Pages Indexed
  • SEO X-ray (nofollow links, H tags, meta data)

2. Xenu

There was a great post written by Ann Smarty that talks about the different things you can do with the Xenu tool.

Basically this tool will allow you to scan and analyze a site to help find potential problems.

  • Broken Links
  • Depth of the Site (crawling issues)
  • Potential Duplicate Content Issues
  • Orphan Pages
  • 404 Error Pages

3. Website Grader

This web-based tool, allows you to enter a url and it will analyze the site, then it creates a user-friendly SEO report. This can be an easy report to generate for a potential client. However, sometimes it can be overwhelming for people because of all of the information it returns.

  • Overall SEO Score (out of 100)
  • Basic On-Page SEO (Meta data, Alt tags, H tags)
  • Basic Off-Site SEO (Domain Age, Pages Indexed, Inbound Links)
  • Blog Analysis
  • Social Media Analysis

4. SEO for Firefox

SEO for Firefox is a plugin that will pull in data about the site within the Google search results. I will use this to see how fierce the competition is and to help determine how much effort and time it will take to optimize a potential clients site. The nice thing about SEO for Firefox is the flexibility to only add data into the results that you want to see. These are the data points I pull in:

  • PageRank
  • Inbound Links
  • Domain Age
  • Google and Yahoo Rankings

5. Rank Checker

Rank Checker is a stand alone firefox plugin (also on the SEO Toolbar) that allows you to check the rankings of a site for specific keywords/phrases. One nice feature about Rank Checker is you can check not only US search engines, but foreign versions of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Data I pull from this tool include:

  • Baseline Rankings
  • Ranking Improvements
  • What URL is Ranking

6. AuditMyPC: Sitemap Generator

There are a lot of sitemap generator tools out there, however I feel that this is the best…plus its free.

  • Generate a XML Sitemap
  • Generate a HTML Sitemap
  • Analyze Website Pages & Structure

7. Reverse IP Lookup

This tool allows you to see what other domains are on the same server. It is not often, but sometimes if a site that has been penalized by Google is hosted on the same server as your site, it can penalize ALL that are on the shared hosting server. This is another reason why being on your own dedicated server can help your SEO.

8. Yahoo! Site Explorer

There are a number of link analysis tools like Link DiagnosisBackLink Watch, andLink Assistant, however Yahoo! Site Explorer I feel still does the best job of not only finding backlinks, but ordering them in place of importance. Here are the main things I will look at when analyzing SiteExplorer links.

9. SocialMention

To see what is being said about a potential or current client, I will use a variety of real-time search engines. I usually will start at SocialMention because it will scour the web including Blogs, Q&A, Forums, Mircoblogs, Social Bookmarks, Events, Video, and News sites for mentionings of your brand or keyword you enter. I can get a better understanding of:

  • Brand Perception
  • Brand Reach
  • Industry Position
  • Influencers in the Industry
  • Types of Communication/Discussions

10. Google Analytics

Of course if you have access to a clients Google Analytics you can find out a wealth of knowledge that you wouldn’t be able to gather with free tools anyone can use. When I first look at a sites analyics I will look at certain data including:

  • Daily Traffic
  • Traffic Sources
  • Keywords
  • Geo-Location
  • User Engagement
  • Conversions

With all of these free tools you can learn a lot about a potential/current client and your competitors. You are able to cover a wide spectrum of information including on-page/off-page factors, social media, reputation management, and user engagement. Feel free to try one or all of these tools the next time you perform some research on a site.

Want to Learn More about Search Marketing?

Here at Network Solutions we have put together some great tools and services for search marketing, local search visibility and pay-per-click advertising. Check them out and if you need some help getting your site optimized, reach out via phone, e-mail or twitter.

How to Use Content Management Systems to Maximize Your Search Results

February 25th, 2010 :: Steven Fisher

Reading the title and coming this far mean the term “content management system” or CMS doesn’t make you want to run. Good, because there is some great stuff I will share with you. You probably remember the days of the simple, basic web site with HTML pages that made up your site. Once you had the site up, things were very straightforward but if you had to make a change you had to either know how to code web pages or hire someone on a perpetual basis to make edits.

Around 2000, there were some systems that allowed you to manage the content and placement along with giving users a simple interface to focus updates in small discreet chunks. These systems initial were very expensive and out of the range of most businesses. Besides, many businesses didn’t have that much to update so it didn’t really matter.

As search engines evolved, their initial goal was to go your web site and spider all the pages that were linked together. If you didn’t update your web site it looked old to Google and it fell in rankings. Not being able to scale a web site, especially if you were a small business, was very apparent.

So as the use of social media tools like blogs took hold in the mid-2000’s, there were open source content management systems like Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress that made it easy to build a web site and publish. Granted, you still needed some good design up front but the content creation could be done by almost anyone. These tools made it easier for search engines to recognize your site as something that was being updated and worthy of a higher search ranking.

Still, it might be somewhat elusive as to what you should look for in a CMS. Search Engine Land has this great list of critical, important, desirable and optional features you should look for in an SEO friendly content system.

Here is the list in it entirety:

Critical CMS features

  • URLs free of tracking parameters and session IDs — Sticking session or tracking information such as the user’s clickpath into the URL is deadly for SEO. It usually leads to incomplete indexation and duplicate content issues.
  • H1 tags — No H1 tags on a given page is not desirable. Too many H1 tags on the page is not desirable. Low-value content (such as the publication date) marked up as an H1 is not desirable. The article title is typically the best content to have wrapped in an H1.
  • Customizable URL structure — If the default URL structure of the CMS doesn’t suit your needs, you should be able to change it. For example, if you don’t want /archives/ in the URLs of all your archived articles, you should be able to remove it. Or if you want to reference the article name instead of the article’s database ID in the URL, you should be able to do it.
  • 301 redirects to canonical URL — Duplicate content is the bane of the existence of many a dynamic website owner. Automatic handling of this by the CMS through the use of 301 redirects is a must.

Important CMS features

  • Static-looking URLs — The most palatable URLs to spiders are the ones that look like they lead to static pages, i.e. no query strings.
  • Keywords in URLs — Keywords in your URLs can help your rankings. It would be a shame to miss out on the opportunity this presents, if your CMS doesn’t support keyword-rich URLs (e.g. only article IDs in the URL).
  • RSS feeds — RSS feeds are essential if you want to reach bloggers; email newsletters won’t cut it for the hip, Web 2.0 crowd. Hopefully this feature also comes integrated with Feedburner, for improved visibility on RSS feed consumption by your subscribers.
  • Pings — This lets blog and feed search engines like Google Blog Search know you have published new content so they can come and grab your latest RSS feed.
  • Tagging and tag clouds — This Web 2.0 feature is powerful for SEO, thanks in large part to the keyword-rich text links. This is your opportunity to rejig your internal linking structure and how you flow PageRank without having to completely gut your taxonomy/ontology.
  • Individually customizable title tags and H1 tags — Each title tag should be decoupled from the post/article/product title. Same goes for H1 tags. That way anchor text can be varied from H1’s which can, in turn, be varied from the title tag. Thus, you can work in additional keywords (synonyms etc.) into the H1, and even more into the title tag — without spamming of course!
  • Multi-level categorization structure — It’s awfully limiting to your site structure and internal hierarchical linking structure to have a CMS that doesn’t allow you to nest subcategories into categories, sub-subcategories into subcategories, and so on.
  • Canonical tags — Although I don’t trust Google to always reliably obey this new tag, it is definitely worthwhile having it available as an option if the need arises (hopefully that need won’t arise if you have 301’s in all the right places).

Desirable CMS features

  • Paraphrasable excerpts — Duplicate content issues are exacerbated on dynamic sites such as blogs when the same content is displayed on permalink pages, category pages, archives-by-date pages, tag pages, and the home page. Crafting unique content for the excerpt and having that content display on all locations except for the the permalink page will help strengthen your permalink page as unique content.
  • Breadcrumb navigation — It reinforces the hierarchical nature of your internal linking structure using text links which are hopefully keyword-rich.
  • Flexible rules for automatically generating title tags — If the title tag always has to start with your site name followed by a colon followed by your article title, you’re sunk — at least as far as your SEO is concerned. You should be able to revise the “recipes” used to generate the title tags across your site to make them more optimal for search.
  • Page-specific meta descriptions — A cardinal sin of dynamic websites is using the same meta description across all the pages. This can be a contributor to duplicate content issues.
  • Meta noindex for low-value pages — Even if you nofollow links to these pages, other people may still link to these and you run the risk of ranking those pages above some of your more valuable content.
  • Keyword-rich intro copy on category-level pages and tag pages — Keyword-rich introductory copy helps set a stable keyword theme/focus for the page, rather than relying on the latest article, product, or blog post to be the most prominent text on the page.
  • Granular control over nofollows on links — If your site allows the posting of user-generated content through “comments,” your site will be a spam-magnet if you don’t nofollow the links posted by commenters. Heck, you’ll probably be a spam magnet anyways, it’ll just be worse for you without the nofollows. Additionally, regardless of your stance on PageRank sculpting and its value for SEO, you should be able to selectively decide when and when not to pass PageRank to an internal page within your site.
  • Customizable anchor text on navigational links — “Contact”, “About Us”, “Read More”, “Full Article” etc. all make for lousy anchor text — at least from an SEO standpoint. Hopefully your CMS allows you to improve such links to make the anchor text more keyword-rich.
  • Mass Edit, or Bulk Upload (or both) — It’s not efficient to go to each page’s Edit screen. Instead, mass modify the titles, H1’s, filenames, and perhaps even meta descriptions, within Excel or a “mass edit” web interface (like the one provided by my SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress.
  • Declared search term — When you decide on a page’s primary keyword focus, you should be able to tuck away that crucial bit of information somewhere where it will be safe from the prying eyes of competitors. That means it should not be parked anywhere in the HTML — including the meta keywords tag — since all a resourceful competitor would need to do is “View Page Source” within their web browser. There should be a field in the database, displayed and accessible to your editors/administrators within the admin interface of your CMS.
  • Auto 301 redirect previous versions of URLs — Imagine updating a permalink or product page URL (e.g. “post slug”) multiple times. Each previous version of a URL could lead the search engines to discover duplicate pages if you’re not careful. Why worry about these old URLs and whether they will stop working or will create duplicate content; let the CMS “worry” about this instead and seamlessly 301 previous iterations to the latest version.
  • Google Product Search feed — If your CMS is powering an online catalog site, then this feature is for you. It can be a real timesaver. And if you are an online retailer not submitting your products into Google Base, heed this warning: neglect Google Product Search (formerly Froogle) at your peril!

Optional CMS features

  • XML Sitemaps generator — A XML sitemap can be submitted to the major engines to improve indexation, but it’s usually unnecessary if you have a search engine friendly CMS; the engines will usually do a good job crawling and discovering your site’s URLs on their own. Google will use your Sitemaps file as a canonicalization signal, but hopefully you don’t need it since your CMS isn’t generating duplicate pages.
  • XHTML validation — When entering your content, it is desirable to have the CMS automatically check for malformed HTML, as search engines may end up “seeing” a page differently from how it renders on the screen and consider navigation to be part of the content or vice versa.
  • Pingbacks, Trackbacks, Comments and Anti-spam mechanisms — The problem with comments/trackbacks/pingbacks is that they are vectors for spam, so if you have one (comments/trackbacks/pingbacks), you will have the other (spam). Therefore, effective spam prevention (e.g. Akismet, Defensio, Mollom) is a must.
  • Tracking and Improving SEO results with Google Analytics

    February 24th, 2010 :: Steven Fisher

    Although I am not a “Quant Jock” who loves to play with spreadsheets and graphs, I have to profess my love for Google Analytics. This tool originally developed by Adaptive Path was sold to Google a few years ago and has evolved and continues to evolve into a solid web analytics package. Sure, there are some killer, super-sophisticated analytics packages out there (e.g. Omniture) but for many sites, especially ones just starting out, Google Analytics is a perfect entry point.

    The sign up process requires a Google account (any email address will do) and a web site that you want to monitor. To get the web site monitored, you tell Google Analytics the web address and insert the code on the page you want to monitor. Every site I work with or build these days has a Google Analytics plugin which can make things easier. While this is not a post in configuration and tuning, it is good to make you aware.

    You can learn all kinds of things about your site, how many visitors, page views, geographic data, popular pages, time on site, etc. You can also integrate your Google Advertising account into this so you can track campaign effectiveness which is quite powerful.

    Getting your site found and up and running is the most basic thing with Google Analytics but what it can really help you with is tracking and improving your SEO results.

    André Scholten over at Yoast has some great advanced tips on doing just that. Check it out:

    A ranking tool can tell you over and over again that a certain keyword is around position 15 in Google while Google Analytics claims he is on page 1 (position 1 to 10). This effect can come from ‘personalized search’ or ‘local results’ that can influence the Google rankings dramatically. People see other results than you see with your ranking tools. And therefore you need Google Analytics to do the real ranking.

    Setup the filter

    To get the rankings in your Google Analytics reports you have to create a new filter:

    analytics google ranking

    The title of the filter contains a 3, that’s because filter 1 and 2 take care of filtering out everything else than Google Organic traffic. So yes: you also have to create a new profile to apply these filters on to be sure you don’t screw up your main profile.

    This filter only works for Google. if you want it to work for Yahoo and Live Search also, make sure you change the filters 1 and 2 so they accept Organic from all three of them. Then setup the filter like this:

    analytics ranking

    The ranking results

    After a while the “User Defined” report will look like this (ignore the language):

    rankings example

    What you see are not the actual rankings, but the number of the first result of the page the keyword was on. So when you see 20, it means the keyword was on the third page, and a 50 means the sixth page. (Yahoo and Live Search will report 21 and 51 in stead of 20 and 50).

    When you don’t see a number but only “(page: ): it means the keyword was on the first page. So perhaps it is better to change “page:” to “minimal position;”, I leave that up to you.

    If you want to filter the list of keywords on keywords with at least a page 2 position you can use “(page: d{2,3})” in the filter field below the list. The d stands for digits, and the 2,3 for the amount of digits you’re looking for.

    The new reports

    If you have implemented everything correct you should see this in the “Visitors -> User Defined” report:

    userdefinedkeywords

    A list of keywords with the position the keyword was on when a visitor clicked it. Now you’re able to see the exact positions, more precise than any ranking tool that is out there. There’s 1 minor drawback: business listings next to the little maps are counted as a position also:

    Sitelinks

    Very interesting: the sitelinks positions are also tracked, and in a more intelligent way than the maps results. If you click on a sitelink, the actual position of that sitelink is passed on. For example, this sitelink has position 4:

    sitelinksranking

    If you want to get better insights about your sitelinks you should create an extra profile with the first 3 filters mentioned above. Then add this extra filter to only track those keywords where people clicked on the (full or oneline) sitelinks:

    Filter name: "Ranking 5"
    Filter type: "Custom filter - Include"
    Filter field: "Referral"
    Filter pattern: "oi=(oneline_sitelinks|smap)"

    The positions you will see are pure sitelinks positions, and you will get an idea about which sitelink is popular and which isn’t.

    Maximize Getting Your Business Found with Inbound Links

    February 23rd, 2010 :: Steven Fisher

    A foundational component of web sites are the concept of links. It is how we move from one page to another and essentially forms the “Web” part of the World Wide Web. As search engines grew in sophistication, linking became a primary part of the algorithm to determine the value of a web site by virtue of how many people link to it or create an inbound link.

    Link building plays vital role in higher search engine placements and good traffic to your website. Links helps in improving your link popularity and in turns helps in top ranking on search engines. There are three types of inbound links – Unidirectional (One Way Links), Reciprocal (Two way links) and Trilateral (Three Way Links) Building Services.

    While doing all this linking can help your business get found, it could also hurt and possibly irreparably damage it with search engines. To prepare you, David Wallace put together this short list of things to do to increase the value of inbound links:

    1. Indexed By Google

    One of the most important factors to look at when securing a link on any specific web page is whether that page is actually indexed by Google. Common sense would tell you that if the page is not in Google’s index, they are not going to recognize that it is linking to your page. In other words, the link won’t count in their eyes.

    2. PageRank

    While Google PageRank is certainly not everything, a PR 5 is certainly better than a PR 1. And a PR 7 or better has the potential of passing a lot of link juice to the page your linking to. That being said, I would recommend having a good mix of links from different PageRanks as it looks more natural.

    3. Relevancy

    Is the site or page relevant to your business model? For example, if I have a site that sells software, I want to obtain links on software related sites. It does not have to necessarily be a competitor but could be a site that reviews various software products or covers news related to software.

    4. Identifying Paid Links

    Try to avoid links that are clearly identified as paid links. Words such as “Sponsored,” “Advertisements,” “Partners” and the like make it very easy for a search engine such as Google, who by the way does not like paid links, identify them. Once they are identified as “paid links” they may no longer pass any link value.

    An easy way for a site to identify a link as sponsored would be to use an image in place of text and then make sure not to give away the details in the image’s alt attribute. That may sound sneaky but remember that Google has pretty much declared war on paid links. So, if you want them to count, make sure the site owner is not making it too easy for Google or any other engine to detect them.

    5. Outbound Links

    How many other sites is the page linking to? I don’t want to see any more than 10 outbound links including mine on any given page. This is especially true if I’m paying for it. The more outbound links, the more diluted the link value that is passed to each site.

    6. Inbound Links

    Does the page have any inbound links from other sites? What types of sites are linking to that page and even more importantly, what are they saying (anchor text)?

    7. Placement of Link

    Search engines, especially Google, have worked hard in the last few years at trying to identify links that are not specifically “editorial” in their context. Therefore it is best to avoid links that are placed in footers, blog rolls and the like that would give of an indicator that it is not “editorial.”

    I typically like links that are within the content itself or even above the fold near site navigation. Keep in mind that a properly placed link in addition to passing link juice may also send valuable traffic your way.

    8. Is Link ‘NoFollowed’

    A link that has the ‘nofollow’ attribute is going to do little as far as passing any link popularity or link juice to your site. That being said, you should not always avoid these types of links as they can drive traffic to your site (Twitter is a great example of this) and even make your link building look more natural in the eyes of search engines.

    9. Alexa Rank

    While a site’s Alexa Rank should not be taken as an exact science, it can provide a good guess at how popular a site is. Because Alexa gathers its data from those who have installed the Alexa toolbar on their browser, traffic results will not be exact. However it is easy enough to see that a site that has an Alexa Rank in the tens of thousands generates a lot more traffic than one who has an Alexa rank in the tens of millions.

    10. Age of Domain

    Two facts regarding domains that have been around for awhile – 1.) search engines seem to place more trust in a domain that has been around for some time; 2.) a domain that has some age to it most likely has acquired inbound links itself.

    This is a great start and a starter checklist of what you should look for when you are doing inbound linking and are approached by people offering to link to you.

    Pay-Per-Click Can Really Pay Off

    February 22nd, 2010 :: Monika Jansen

    From musiquegirl on FlickrOur focus this month at Grow Smart Business has been on getting found.  We’ve been writing a lot about SEO, and I’ve actually learned quite a bit about it.  I am not an SEO expert, so I had no idea how involved it was or how expensive it can be to implement.  If, like me, you are on a limited budget, marketing or otherwise, consider incorporating pay-per-click (PPC) into your marketing plan.  According to my good friend Harry Brooks of Search First Marketing, PPC is one of the most important elements of a marketing strategy.  From huge multi-national corporations to local service-based businesses, Harry said PPC is a must for driving traffic to your website.

    Monika: How does PPC work?

    Harry: It’s pretty simple, really.  There are six steps to it:

    1.  Write an ad or ads about your business, product, or service. 
    2. Create a list of key phrases, which, when entered into the Google search field, will trigger your ad to appear. 
    3. Tell Google how much you are willing to pay if someone clicks on your ad. 
    4. Activate your campaign and watch traffic start to come to your site. 
    5. As people type your key phrases into the Google search field, your ad will appear.
    6. As you get some history on your campaign, you will gather enough data to optimize and refine your campaign for conversions and cost.

    Monika: That sounds really easy, especially when compared to on-page optimization.  But I bet there’s a catch.

    Harry: Well, all of that is MUCH easier said than done!  But there are three things to keep in mind that make PPC so important. 

    Speed to market.  A PPC campaign can be set up and launched in an afternoon.  Results will start accumulating immediately.  Within hours, targeted visitors can be arriving at your website.

    Targeting. Because the PPC campaign is defined entirely by the business, it can be laser focused on specific products or on a specific target market.  For example, an accounting firm might launch a PPC campaign for Quickbooks Pro Advisory Services (rather than accounting in general).  In doing so, the accounting firm is spending marketing dollars on a very specific part of their overall target market—those looking for help with Quickbooks.  Beyond product specific targeting, PPC campaigns can be geo-targeted to specific cities, regions, or to a defined geographic radius.  By focusing a PPC campaign so specifically, an advertiser can expect a higher level of qualified visitor, and thus, more conversions from site visitors to new customers.

    Budgeting.  PPC can be budgeted down to the penny, which is in stark contrast to traditional marketing vehicles, which can have variable expenses (i.e. graphic design, printing, postage, list purchases, etc.). PPC budgets are defined by the advertiser.

    Monika: So, how does a business owner figure out what to spend on PPC?

    Harry: The first question I ask a potential client is, “What is the average value of a new customer?”  Knowing this information, we can craft a PPC campaign that will best meet the needs of the client.  For example, let’s say a painting contractor has an average customer value of $2500. If we have a PPC budget of $800 per month and find that the campaign is generating 4 new customers per month, PPC is working. The acquisition cost is only $200/customer with an average value of $2500.

    Monika: I’ve heard a few things about Google’s Quality Score in PPC campaigns.  What is it, and how does it work?

    Harry:  I’m glad you asked, because there is more to a PPC campaign than writing an ad, choosing a few key phrases, and setting a budget.  Google uses a sophisticated “Quality Score” algorithm to determine how your PPC campaign will perform.  Quality Score dictates how much your clicks will cost and what position your ad will be in relative to other advertisers.  To further complicate things, Quality Scores are calculated for each individual key phrase contained in your campaign.

    Monika:  How do you get a high Quality Score?

    Harry: Here are a few things to do:

    Split test your ads.  Google uses the click-through-rate (CTR) as part of the Quality Score calculation.  By split testing your ads, you are constantly improving your ads’ performance.  As your average CTR improves, so too will your Quality Scores.  You will see a commensurate improvement in average cost per click and ad position.

    Design your website with quality in mind.  Here are some of the things Google looks for on a website: 

    1. A physical address
    2. A privacy policy
    3. Contact information
    4. Resources or outbound links to other authority sites
    5. Well-crafted pages with unique titles, meta descriptions, headers and sufficient body copy (aim for 250 words)
      FAQ page
    6. About Us page

    Be sure to include all of these elements in your site before you launch a PPC campaign!

    Don’t be afraid to hire a specialist.  I talk to many businesses who have tried Adwords on their own only to lose money on it.  In many of those cases, there were some problems that a professional could have identified and fixed to make the campaign a success.

    Monika: Great, thanks for that tutorial Harry! 

    Harry: My pleasure!  There is a Beginner’s Guide to Adwords on Google, which is worth checking out.

    Pass It Along: 8 Tips for a Successful E-Newsletter

    February 22nd, 2010 :: Monika Jansen

    From cocolinda on Flickr

    Like blog writing, e-newsletters can be really fun to write while at the same time being a great way to position you or your company as a thought leader.  Make them entertaining, keep them filled with useful content, and give them personality, and you will attract eager readers. 

    OK, that last statement was a little disingenuous.  It’s not really that easy.  There are several other things that go into a successful e-newsletter.  (By successful, I mean one that is not only read by people but that also drives traffic to your website.)

    Here are 8 quick tips to help you put together a successful e-newsletter: 

    1. Send it to the right people.  Know who your audience is (hint, it is not everyone in your address book!).  Unless you put together a solid list of people who would find your newsletter useful, few people will read it.  Keep in mind that whether you use Network Solutions, Constant Contact, Vertical Response, or someone else, you cannot buy a list and use it with their programs.  
    2.  Keep it short.  Just like with blogs, no one has time to read a long article, let alone several long articles.  Include one article/topic of no more than 300 words.  If there is more information to share on that topic, write about it in your next e-newsletter or provide a hyperlink to your website in case readers would like to learn more. 
    3. Make it easy to pass along.  Be sure it’s easy for people to forward and subscribe to your newsletter.  Email marketing programs provide ways to do this in their templates.  Use them!  Remember, the more readers the better!
    4.  Include graphics.  Photos, illustrations, even charts or graphs will make your newsletter more interesting to read and look at.  Just be sure they are relevant to your topic.  I like to pull photos off of Flickr for this blog (type in Creative Commons in the Advanced Search box—you can use any of those photos), but most email marketing programs allow you to use photos in their gallery (you’ll have to pay for that feature). Be sure you give the photographer or artist credit for the graphic you are using.
    5. Use your logo and your logo/company colors.  This is just good branding.  You want your readers to recognize your newsletter as yours.
    6. Keep format and delivery timetable consistent.  People like consistency.  If you’re going to share a tip, an interview with a client, or a coupon, do it in every newsletter.  Figure out a delivery timetable and email your newsletter out around the same time, whether it’s every month, every other week, or every week.    
    7. Let content build on previous topics.  This will keep readers eager to hear what else you have to say on a subject, and it’s easier for you—you don’t have to keep thinking up new topics. 
    8. Use attention-grabbing subject lines.  The subject line that shows up in your readers’ inboxes must be intriguing.  It can be witty, sarcastic, silly, a little out-there, whatever.  It just needs to be compelling enough to get your reader to click on it. 

    Social Media Checklist for Your Small Business

    February 19th, 2010 :: Steven Fisher

    If you are in any type of role that involves marketing, you are doing or exploring how to utilize Social Media in your organization. Most of us have heard the buzzword “Social Media” and have probably seen the icons on websites and in print for places like Facebook and Twitter.

    Two primary things a small business needs to look a first before diving into Social Media – first, it is about having a conversation with people and second, you need to have outposts where those people are located. I was inspired by Heidi Rosen’s check list on social media so to help you get moving along, we put together this amended check list to get your business found using social media.

    First, Ask Yourself if Your Business is best able to use social media

    Heidi Rosen’s social media checklist has some great advice that is worth listing and we will condense some that along with adding some of our own experiences.

    • Find the things that connect with their profession, passions and hobbies – Many companies who try social media thinking this will be a channel to pump out their press releases and information in robot-like format have got it all wrong. If you are selling cars, connect with people’s love of cars not with the corporate mumbo-jumbo. People want you to have a personal face in social media. Heidi mentions that “from a social media marketing perspective, this translates to ways that people can share their hobbies and special interests using photographs, videos, and blogs.
    • Share content that people find useful and want to share with others – Beyond articles that talk about a topic, this includes photos, videos and audio. For example, wedding photographers can show their portfolio from other weddings. Other ideas are fishing guides who put up some videos on fishing tips or bakeries that show their finished products and cool projects off.
    • Look for ways to demonstrate thought leadership – If you an expert in something, you need to show people this so they know that and would consider engaging you. Heidi says that “this can work very well for professionals like lawyers and accountants. Leverage videos, presentations, and Webinars giving how-to tips to explain wills or budgeting.
    • Look for niche communities where your prospects and customers are alreadyFor the independent Firefly/Serenity sci-fi film for charity that I am producing, there is an existing community of Firefly/Serenity fans that love the universe that it is set in.
    • If there are existing outposts, consider contributing to them to engage If so, actively comment and add to the conversation. Offer to create guest posts to share your knowledge and broaden your audience. This means adding real value to the conversation.

    Second, understand what your measurements of success are with Social Media

    Everybody loves metrics but so few know what should really be measured. Each business is different and the tools vary to get the numbers you might be looking for in a social media program. Heidi Rosen put together some basic metrics for your small business:

    • Revenues. Have sales increased? It’s important to note that it may take time to build up a social media following.
    • Expenses. Track actual costs as well as the time involved in participating in social media marketing.
    • Prospects and customers. Track the number of people who are engaging with your social media efforts. Often, there’s a 90 percent readers/viewers, 9 percent commenters, and 1 percent active content creators breakout.
    • Feedback. Monitor the type, amount, and quality of feedback you’re receiving

    Photo: iStockphoto (licensed to Steven Fisher)

    Get Great SEO Results with Your Small Business Blog

    February 17th, 2010 :: Steven Fisher

    Blogging has become a staple in every company’s marketing strategy yet, very few understand it. Still, people upgrade their web sites to include a blog, they might start out with trying to publish every day and after a week or two realizing that this is actually work, they give up. The blog then languishes dead on arrival and people wonder if you even care about your business. Yeah, it can look that bad.

    The upside of utilizing a blog goes beyond thought leadership, communicating with customers or whatever mission you have set for the blog. The biggest upside is that it can help your small business get found far easier and faster with the right people coming to your site. You want traffic to your web site, but you want the right kind of traffic. A blog is catnip for search engines and we have put together some great tips from our experience and a few from some other places to help get great SEO results and get your business found.

    Do Your Setup Right from the Beginning

    Get Your Titles and Blog Links Right – You should closely look at your titles because great blog links to great SEO results. Glen over at the viral marketing firm, Viperchill, has a few great points in the blog setup:

    • Tweak the Permalinks – Permalinks are simply the URL’s of your blog posts and pages. By default, your URL’s are setup like http://www.viperchill.com/p=8 which isn’t very pretty and doesn’t give an indication to what the page is about. In Settings >> Permalinks I use the custom option and type %postname%. This means that my URL’s can be something like http://www.viperchill.com/launching-new-blog/ which is both pretty and informative.
    • Enable Threaded Comments – In the past I would have installed a plugin for this, but now Wordpress offers this as standard. In Settings >> Discussion you can choose to enable nested comments and select how many levels deep you would want these to go. This enhances the conversation in your comments and allows you and other readers to reply to specific comments directly.
    • Add Ping Services – You probably won’t have to do this, but when I installed my blog there were no ping services in the Options >> Writing section of my Wordpress admin panel. Adding ping services means that you can send trackbacks to other blogs which lets them know when you link to their posts. It also gets your site listed in Technorati and other blog aggregation services.

    Add Some Critical Functionality

    Once you are setup on your blog, there are a few basic things I usually do with a blog for a client. First is to add a few pages. If this is a self-standing blog, you should have an about page or a navigation that leads to your about section. You should also have a contact page and form especially if you are trying to gather leads. This should be extensive and in different places if lead generation or specific landing pages are a part of your marketing campaigns.

    You also should have a few posts right out of the gate that do two things – give people something to read when you launch the blog and tell everyone about it and to show people what kind of stuff you write about along with the style/voice you will have on the blog. People will want to subscribe if they like what they see and you usually only have one shot at getting them.

    Speaking of subscribers, join Feedburner and hook your blog up to it. Feedburner allows you to keep track of how many subscribers your blog has and what services your readers use. You can easily setup email subscriptions and insert social bookmarking links directly into your feed. Plus, if you need to change the blog address on the backend you can do it without impacting the readers who subscribe through the Feedburner feed.

    Use Killer Plugins

    There are so many plugins out there for your blog, especially if you use WordPress. I found this great SEO plugin list from Michael Wolf of Graywolf Consulting. I have used many of these and create a short list below:

    • Meta Robots WordPress plugin – Adds meta tags automatically to posts
    • Aizatto’s Related Posts – Adds related post information to posts and feeds
    • Cross-Linker – Set up commonly used words to link to posts or redirects (also useful for affiliate links)
    • Sitemap Generator – Automatically builds and HTML style sitemap
    • Google (XML) Sitemaps – Automatically build and ping multiple sitemap services with an XML file
    • HeadSpace 2 – A monster plugin that lets you rewrite titles, meta data, and host of other features watch the video on the page for the full list of features
    • SEO Title Tag – Don’t need all the power of Headspace try SEO title tag
    • SEO Slugs – keeps slugs from becoming too long

    For my WordPress installations, I also really like the “All-in-One SEO” plugin which has quite a lot packed into one plug-in.

    Ramp Up the SEO Juice

    This is final step in the getting the blog operational for great SEO results. Glen over at the viral marketing firm, Viperchill, did a great job covering this part, so I will let him do the talking. Here you go:

    • “No Follow Certain Links – Adding the nofollow attribute to certain links tells search engines not to pass Pagerank to them and not to give any ‘benefits’ to the receiving page or site. This attribute was created due to the influx of spam on the Web and is used by default in Wordpress comments. I also not follow links to pages that don’t need my link juice such as About or Contact and even things like my RSS feed. Google engineer Matt Cutts wrote that Google frowns on this sort of activity so use it at your own risk.
    • Change Your Title – Anyone with a clue about SEO will tell you the most important thing to optimise for on-site SEO is your title tag. By default, the Wordpress title tag is backwards. What I mean by that is it will show you the website name first before a post title on individual post pages. Instead, I prefer to simply show the post title by itself and then choose my own title for the homepage. My code for this being: <title><?php if(is_home()) { echo ‘Viral Marketing : ViperChill’; } else { wp_title(”) ;} ?></title> The title of your homepage should include the keyphrase you choose from the next point.
    • Choose a Keyphrase – Tons of people like to simply name their website after what it’s called, and not what it offers, and that’s fine. I, on the other hand, like to kill two birds with one stone by choosing a title that is both descriptive and has the potential to get me search engine traffic. Head over to the Google Keywords tool and find a term that is relevant to your niche and gets a lot of searches. Once you have decided on a phrase, put it on your title and try to get backlinks to your site with this as the anchor text. For example, if you ever write guest posts then you can link to your website with this term as the hyperlink. There is a lot more to SEO and getting rankings than this, but that should get you started.
    • Get My Social Media Profiles – If you’re hoping your site will become a well known brand in your niche then it’s important to get accounts on the top social media sites with your site name to stop people hijacking your brand in the future. These should also help you ‘dominate’ the search results for your name. To start with, I recommend signing up to: Twitter, Technorati, MyBlogLog, YouTube and Flickr and any other sites that are relevant to your niche.”

    What Are Your Results? Need some assistance from SEO professionals?

    Have you implemented any of these tips? What have been your results? Do you need some additional help from some SEO professionals?

    Photo: Jay Lopez

    Does great CRM software exist for an independent professional?

    February 17th, 2010 :: Carlos Diggs

    One of the greatest frustrations for many independent professionals is the lack of a really good, flexible, economical contact relationship management system.

    Does such a thing exist for a solo business person?

    Everyone’s needs are unique. Your knowledge and experience may make the selection and implementation easy or difficult. You may have to compromise on a few features and functionality and settle for at least 80% of your requirements. I have spoken with many colleagues and clients who are all dissatisfied with what they are using. So, a fundamental question is this: Is there a resource for doing a fair assessment of all options? Well, it depends.

    All successful systems and software selection projects begin with a list of requirements or wish list (Must have vs. Would like to have). You may ask, “Where should one start? Are there knowledgeable people who can guide a person or team toward an intelligent selection of a contact management system?” The answer is YES.  They exist at www.360salesfocus.com. 360SF will hold your hand through the entire selection process or provide just-in-time coaching on an as needed basis. For individuals who want to do it themselves, below are some initial considerations.

    Regardless of the nature of your practice as an independent professional or the size of a company, its sales value and volume, business development for simple or complex opportunities, I always suggest to clients to first clearly define their processes before evaluating and selecting a technology or automation tool for anything.

    For example: What does a typical sales cycle look like for you? How do you process new leads/contacts? How soon do you follow up?  What method do you prefer (email, letter, greeting card, phone call, etc.)? What’s the message? Do you have a sales/biz dev process? What are the steps, decisions, possible outcomes, etc.?

    Processes enable people and technology enables processes

    Technology without a correctly defined process will speed up poor results. It’s the old garbage in, garbage out concept…but faster.

    MY PREFERED METHOD when I was an independent consultant: Even though I’ve implemented, used, optimized, and managed several CRM projects for clients (including SalesForce.com and ACT!), for 20 plus years as a solo consultant or, as the only business development person, my preferred CRM & Sales Force Automation (SFA) has consisted mostly of Microsoft Outlook for basic contact profile descriptions & management. I first had to learn effective relationship management without technology to make this work, thanks to Stephen Covey’s 7-Habits of Effective People. Outlook has all the basics such as detail contact info, calendar, and task, space for tons of notes, attachments, and links on every item. I think this may be true for most PC & Mac office-like contact/calendar/email applications.

    For forecasting and tracking sales/business development opportunities, a spreadsheet does it all on one sheet, one line per opportunity (forecast of qualified opportunities…date, company, contact, offer, value, priority, close date, win-probability percentage, next Step (notes/remarks). If you want to see a good example, contact www.360salefocus.com/contact-us for a free Microsoft Excel forecasting spreadsheet that we use often and that you may use and modify for your unique purposes.

    One of my requirements is mobility. Both Outlook and the spreadsheet interface well and are mobile (works on my smart phone).  I use Card Scan to scan business cards that I receive from meetings and networking events. I import and synchronize contacts with Outlook. It’s also great for mail merges (letters and emails). I’ve also incorporated David Allen’s Getting Things Done method for processing all my action items.

    Once you get your process defined, then you can go shopping. Effective contact relationship management is at the core of what I do and coach my clients to do. Technology can bog you down if you are not careful. Let’s face it; nothing gets done unless you do it…whether on paper or on-screen. A discipline to keep records up to date, follow-up and follow-through still requires the consistent human touch.

    One other consideration might be a marketing campaign management system for managing high volumes (> 500 contacts per campaign) of outbound/inbound lead generation efforts of large and frequent marketing campaigns (direct mail, events, website leads, etc.). This is ideal for processing and managing hundreds of leads that you will try to convert to clients. You still need a process first.

    Unless you are trying to track contacts for a multiple people, I would keep it simple and use your desktop office apps for contact profiles, scheduling events/meetings and tasks, date all detail notes, and use every reminder and alert possible.

    If you need help implementing a program like this, consider contacting a sales consultant.

    Share your experience by leaving a comment.

    At http://www.360salesfocus.com we have an entire integrated sales and marketing company at your disposal. How can we help you generate more business? Let’s talk about making something happen for your company.

    Carlos Diggs is Managing Partner at 360 Sales Focus, a full service sales and marketing consultancy. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed at www.linkedin.com/in/carlosdiggs. Reach Carlos at cdiggs@360salesfocus.com or 410.782.0360 or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/360salesfocus.