Posted on Mon, Sep. 20, 2010
Marketing help just clicks away
BY TASHA CUNNINGHAM
Tasha@BizBytes101.com
1. Twilert. This is a Twitter app that allows you to receive e-mail updates of tweets that contain keywords related to your business. Other apps like TweetDeck let you do the same thing, but Twilert sends the updates directly to your e-mail in-box so you can view them when it's convenient for you.
2. Slide Rocket. Slide Rocket is a free online tool for creating slick, professional Flash-enabled presentations that can showcase your products and services. It's like turbo-charged version of PowerPoint. You can share your presentations instantly on YouTube and Flickr and track the number of people that view your presentation using Slide Rocket analytics.
3. Click Tale. With pricing plans that start at free, Click Tale is an essential tool that lets you learn more about how your visitors interact with your website. You can record snapshots or ``movies'' of your customers' browsing sessions and get detailed information on how they use all areas of your site. You can use the data you collect to improve their customer experience while on your website.
4. Trackur. Trackur is a tool that allows you to monitor what people are saying about your brand on social blogs, social networks, and online forums.
5. iKarma. Based in Jupiter, Fla., this reputation management tool allows you to compare customer comments, review products and services and get customer referrals that help you manage your brand's online word-of-mouth.
6. BrandDoozie. This do-it-yourself online tool allows you to create professional marketing materials in minutes including business cards, logos, brochures and flyers. It's free to create your materials and just $19.99 when you're ready to download and print them, saving you thousands of dollars in design costs.
7. Shoutlet. With this tool, you can distribute, track and manage your social media marketing campaigns across different social networks at once, saving your business time and money.
8. Later Bro. This service saves you time by allowing you to post-date Facebook and Twitter updates. You can plan, create and schedule updates for delivery to your customers at a later date.
9. PRLog.org . This service is completely free and lets you distribute press releases about your company to blogs, search engines and news sites. It's a great way for a cash-strapped entrepreneur like you to get the word out about your products and services.
10. Pitchrate.com . This free service will help you maximize your public relations and marketing efforts by connecting you with journalists who write about topics related to your business. It also offers free guidance on how to get publicity and a regular free ``PR Happy Hour,'' a series of conference calls that let you interact live with marketing and PR experts to ask questions and get advice.
Check out BizBytes101.com for more must-have marketing tips.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/20/v-print/1830154/marketing-help-just-clicks-away.html#ixzz106K1TL48
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Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts
Online Marketing for Small Businesses (Information Week)
Ten Local Online Marketing Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)
May 25, 2010
By Court Cunningham
In his new book, "Local Online Advertising for Dummies," Court Cunningham shares strategies and tips that can help SMBs seize opportunities in local markets and sidestep common mistakes.
The following excerpt from Court Cunningham's book "Local Online Advertising for Dummies," is presented by InformationWeek SMB courtesy of Wiley Publishing.
BOOK EXCERPT
Local Online Advertising for Dummies
Chapter 18: Ten Local Online Marketing Mistakes (And How To Avoid Them)
This foray into the world of online advertising is kind of a grand adventure. Although there is clearly a beaten path that you need to follow to maximize your chances for success, at times, you'll see your efforts come up short and wonder: What the heck am I doing wrong?
In a lot of cases, the fault isn't so much with the execution, but with the thinking or preconceptions. Because these things are part and parcel of your inner self, they can be really hard to recognize as the actual culprits when your efforts aren't having the results you want.
In our experience, many people make certain mental errors when launching themselves into the online arena -- and in this chapter, we list the ten most common.
1. Assuming Your Customers Behave Like You
Maybe you're a 25-year-old running online marketing for a retirement community. Just because you go to the blogosphere before you buy any products or services doesn't mean that your target audience does. Conversely, you might be a 70-year-old dentist, and you think the Internet is just a fad. You need to think the way customers think and figure how they find businesses. No matter what your mom told you, in this case, don't be yourself.
2. Not Knowing Your Limits
You can create your own Web site, do search engine optimization (SEO), and run your own pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. That's one of the reasons books like this exist. However, to do these things right, you need to spend an appropriate amount of time on them. That means that the five minutes you spend monthly on your PPC campaign may not be enough, and consequently, you're wasting money that could just as well go to pay someone to take care of your local online advertising for you. Think hard about whether you'll make an ongoing commitment to optimizing your advertising campaigns. If not, maybe the best thing to do is go with the pros.
3. Assuming Web Site Aesthetics Equals Web Site Success
You may think all the frames, flash, and images you've put on your Web site look great. Unfortunately, that great stuff is all but invisible to the search engines. Like Joe Friday, search engines want only the facts. The subjective stuff on your site can be a lot of fun to create, but if content on your Web site can't even be read by the search engines, you aren't even in the game. Think like a search engine does. Make sure you have
A search engine-friendly URL
A site map (or site index)
Contact information on every page
Keyword-rich copy
Footers
Reciprocal links In other words, position yourself to be found before you worry about being impressive. And when in doubt, test and learn.
4. Creating a Web Site That No One Visits
If you build it, they will come, right? Wrong. Just because you have a Web site doesn't mean anyone will go there. To get people to your site, you need to drive traffic -- whether that means using SEO, PPC, e-mails, banners, or some of the other tools we talk about in this book. The moral of the story: Give people a road; then they will come.
5. Making It Difficult for Potential Customers to Contact You
You'd be surprised how many local business Web sites we see that don't even show the phone number. Or the contact information is buried deep down the Contact Us page. Your phone number (or however you want your potential customers to contact you) needs to be large and in charge on your Web site. Throw an easy-to-fill-out form on your page, too. That way potential customers who don't want to call still have a way to contact you.
6. Caring Too Much about How Many People Visit Your Site
This may at first seem contrary to the mistake of creating a Web site that no one visits, but it isn't. True, you need people to go to your site to get sales, but not all site visitors are equal. You can waste a lot of money paying vendors or directories for meaningless clicks that don't convert into new customers. This is especially important to remember when you use something like PPC. Sometimes you're better off to pay a premium for expensive keyword search terms instead of driving a lot traffic that represents only traffic -- and no sales.
7. Having Google Tunnel Vision
Yes, Google is the most important search engine by a long shot. We know this, you know this, and so do all your competitors. Although the most traffic is on Google, it isn't unusual for other search engines and directories to have more cost-efficient ways to drive traffic. When possible, the best strategy is to test a variety of sites (including Google) and see which one ultimately works best for your business.
8. Not Knowing whether Your Marketing Is Really Working
One of the greatest things about online advertising is that it's so measurable. The rub, of course, is that measuring takes work. But the payoff will be well worth it because you can focus your ad dollars on those channels and methods that work while cutting the fat out of your budget.
Arguably, the best five things for you to measure are
Traffic numbers (the number of visitors you get)
Conversion rates
Your cost per lead
Your cost per acquisition
Your return on investment
You can keep track of other things as well, such as how long visitors from particular channels stay on your site, but the five items here tell you what you most need to know.
9. Not Getting Sales from Calls
Your phone rings off the hook, but you still aren't getting any new customers. What could be wrong? For starters, answer your phone! According to a survey by FastCall411 of 5,000 local businesses, approximately two-thirds of incoming calls to local businesses go unanswered. What's more, a study by market research firm Synovate found that four out of five Americans regard immediate availability by phone as an important -- or the most important -- factor when selecting a local service provider. In the end, not picking up your phone is akin to taking that cash that you paid for your advertising and throwing it into a bonfire. Additionally, make sure that you or your staff handles those calls with the utmost care. After all, those people on the other end of the line have your future in their hands.
10. Not Doing Any Loyalty/Retention Marketing
Getting new customers is far more expensive than keeping existing ones. Make sure you're doing everything you can to take care of the ones you have. Keep in touch via an e-mail newsletter or offer them occasional special deals. Today's online tools make that sort of thing easy to do. So do it!
Court Cunningham is CEO of Yodle, a leading local online advertising company that works with thousands of businesses. Before joining Yodle, he held positions at Community Connect and Double Click.
May 25, 2010
By Court Cunningham
In his new book, "Local Online Advertising for Dummies," Court Cunningham shares strategies and tips that can help SMBs seize opportunities in local markets and sidestep common mistakes.
The following excerpt from Court Cunningham's book "Local Online Advertising for Dummies," is presented by InformationWeek SMB courtesy of Wiley Publishing.
BOOK EXCERPT
Local Online Advertising for Dummies
Chapter 18: Ten Local Online Marketing Mistakes (And How To Avoid Them)
This foray into the world of online advertising is kind of a grand adventure. Although there is clearly a beaten path that you need to follow to maximize your chances for success, at times, you'll see your efforts come up short and wonder: What the heck am I doing wrong?
In a lot of cases, the fault isn't so much with the execution, but with the thinking or preconceptions. Because these things are part and parcel of your inner self, they can be really hard to recognize as the actual culprits when your efforts aren't having the results you want.
In our experience, many people make certain mental errors when launching themselves into the online arena -- and in this chapter, we list the ten most common.
1. Assuming Your Customers Behave Like You
Maybe you're a 25-year-old running online marketing for a retirement community. Just because you go to the blogosphere before you buy any products or services doesn't mean that your target audience does. Conversely, you might be a 70-year-old dentist, and you think the Internet is just a fad. You need to think the way customers think and figure how they find businesses. No matter what your mom told you, in this case, don't be yourself.
2. Not Knowing Your Limits
You can create your own Web site, do search engine optimization (SEO), and run your own pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. That's one of the reasons books like this exist. However, to do these things right, you need to spend an appropriate amount of time on them. That means that the five minutes you spend monthly on your PPC campaign may not be enough, and consequently, you're wasting money that could just as well go to pay someone to take care of your local online advertising for you. Think hard about whether you'll make an ongoing commitment to optimizing your advertising campaigns. If not, maybe the best thing to do is go with the pros.
3. Assuming Web Site Aesthetics Equals Web Site Success
You may think all the frames, flash, and images you've put on your Web site look great. Unfortunately, that great stuff is all but invisible to the search engines. Like Joe Friday, search engines want only the facts. The subjective stuff on your site can be a lot of fun to create, but if content on your Web site can't even be read by the search engines, you aren't even in the game. Think like a search engine does. Make sure you have
A search engine-friendly URL
A site map (or site index)
Contact information on every page
Keyword-rich copy
Footers
Reciprocal links In other words, position yourself to be found before you worry about being impressive. And when in doubt, test and learn.
4. Creating a Web Site That No One Visits
If you build it, they will come, right? Wrong. Just because you have a Web site doesn't mean anyone will go there. To get people to your site, you need to drive traffic -- whether that means using SEO, PPC, e-mails, banners, or some of the other tools we talk about in this book. The moral of the story: Give people a road; then they will come.
5. Making It Difficult for Potential Customers to Contact You
You'd be surprised how many local business Web sites we see that don't even show the phone number. Or the contact information is buried deep down the Contact Us page. Your phone number (or however you want your potential customers to contact you) needs to be large and in charge on your Web site. Throw an easy-to-fill-out form on your page, too. That way potential customers who don't want to call still have a way to contact you.
6. Caring Too Much about How Many People Visit Your Site
This may at first seem contrary to the mistake of creating a Web site that no one visits, but it isn't. True, you need people to go to your site to get sales, but not all site visitors are equal. You can waste a lot of money paying vendors or directories for meaningless clicks that don't convert into new customers. This is especially important to remember when you use something like PPC. Sometimes you're better off to pay a premium for expensive keyword search terms instead of driving a lot traffic that represents only traffic -- and no sales.
7. Having Google Tunnel Vision
Yes, Google is the most important search engine by a long shot. We know this, you know this, and so do all your competitors. Although the most traffic is on Google, it isn't unusual for other search engines and directories to have more cost-efficient ways to drive traffic. When possible, the best strategy is to test a variety of sites (including Google) and see which one ultimately works best for your business.
8. Not Knowing whether Your Marketing Is Really Working
One of the greatest things about online advertising is that it's so measurable. The rub, of course, is that measuring takes work. But the payoff will be well worth it because you can focus your ad dollars on those channels and methods that work while cutting the fat out of your budget.
Arguably, the best five things for you to measure are
Traffic numbers (the number of visitors you get)
Conversion rates
Your cost per lead
Your cost per acquisition
Your return on investment
You can keep track of other things as well, such as how long visitors from particular channels stay on your site, but the five items here tell you what you most need to know.
9. Not Getting Sales from Calls
Your phone rings off the hook, but you still aren't getting any new customers. What could be wrong? For starters, answer your phone! According to a survey by FastCall411 of 5,000 local businesses, approximately two-thirds of incoming calls to local businesses go unanswered. What's more, a study by market research firm Synovate found that four out of five Americans regard immediate availability by phone as an important -- or the most important -- factor when selecting a local service provider. In the end, not picking up your phone is akin to taking that cash that you paid for your advertising and throwing it into a bonfire. Additionally, make sure that you or your staff handles those calls with the utmost care. After all, those people on the other end of the line have your future in their hands.
10. Not Doing Any Loyalty/Retention Marketing
Getting new customers is far more expensive than keeping existing ones. Make sure you're doing everything you can to take care of the ones you have. Keep in touch via an e-mail newsletter or offer them occasional special deals. Today's online tools make that sort of thing easy to do. So do it!
Court Cunningham is CEO of Yodle, a leading local online advertising company that works with thousands of businesses. Before joining Yodle, he held positions at Community Connect and Double Click.
How to Put Your Business on Facebook ( Entrepreneur Magazine)
Dani Babb: The Online Professor
Group, Fan Page or Both?
Make sure your Facebook strategy is the one that works best for your business.
By Dani Babb | March 09, 2010
URL: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/theonlineprofessor/article205406.html
In today's social media-driven marketing frenzy, online business owners are expected to be top in their game in using tools like Facebook and Twitter to their advantage. These free tools are increasing in popularity but also in saturation--many people report not reading updates anymore because of "information overload." It's important to keep information fresh, useful and purposeful while adding, if your brand allows, some humor and interesting information.
One of the most common questions I get about Facebook is, "What options should I use? Groups or regular pages?" This is a more complicated question than it seems on the surface, but important for making certain you spend your hard-earned money and precious time in areas that will give you the most bang for your buck. You can certainly have both, but it's important to know what you can and can't do with each.
First, let's take a look at a standard Facebook fan page and some of the options available to you. Pages can be viewed by unregistered users, though you will need to set your security preferences for this. A viewer does not need to be a Facebook member to view your fan page either. You can add extra applications to make your page more personal and send messages to all members using the updates feature. Pages also allow you to see statistics. You can create a corporate "person" page. There are tighter security options now in Facebook than in the past, so be sure to explore what each of those does. I recommend logging out and seeing what you can and can't view while not logged in as a registered user. Fan pages can be useful in helping the viral aspect of social media because "Joe became a fan of…" pops up on each persons wall (unless they turn it off or remove it) when they become a fan of your business.
Groups, on the other hand, allow you to send out bulk invitations (for instance, you can ask all of your friends to join the group) and any of your group members can also invite their friends. If you have "friends" on your Facebook page who are acquaintances or just share common interests this is a good way to market.
A group, however, has a limitation of 5,000 members if you wish to send a message. They are generally considered to be best for more personal interaction. I use a group, for example, to help people find online teaching jobs called "Make Money Teaching Online" where members share experiences, job tips and who's hiring. Group pages allow you to set other administrators to see who is requesting to join the group. If you post something to the group page, it will also show up on your personal wall. Some people don't like this because it ties them to their businesses, but this can be useful in creating a "person behind the online business" feeling with your customers. You have more control over participants and permissions with group memberships.
Both groups and fan pages allow you to create discussions and others to reply. Both have a wall for people to write on. Both allow you to share videos and pictures. Both require you to manually remove posts as an administrator if something does not meet your standards or purpose for the page. Both also allow you to create events.
Regardless of which one you choose (of course, you can have both), be sure to update regularly, keep your audience engaged and offer something of value. If you use your page or group purely for promotional reasons, you are far less likely to build loyalty, and there's a good chance that your members and friends won't be returning to your pages anytime soon.
Group, Fan Page or Both?
Make sure your Facebook strategy is the one that works best for your business.
By Dani Babb | March 09, 2010
URL: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/theonlineprofessor/article205406.html
In today's social media-driven marketing frenzy, online business owners are expected to be top in their game in using tools like Facebook and Twitter to their advantage. These free tools are increasing in popularity but also in saturation--many people report not reading updates anymore because of "information overload." It's important to keep information fresh, useful and purposeful while adding, if your brand allows, some humor and interesting information.
One of the most common questions I get about Facebook is, "What options should I use? Groups or regular pages?" This is a more complicated question than it seems on the surface, but important for making certain you spend your hard-earned money and precious time in areas that will give you the most bang for your buck. You can certainly have both, but it's important to know what you can and can't do with each.
First, let's take a look at a standard Facebook fan page and some of the options available to you. Pages can be viewed by unregistered users, though you will need to set your security preferences for this. A viewer does not need to be a Facebook member to view your fan page either. You can add extra applications to make your page more personal and send messages to all members using the updates feature. Pages also allow you to see statistics. You can create a corporate "person" page. There are tighter security options now in Facebook than in the past, so be sure to explore what each of those does. I recommend logging out and seeing what you can and can't view while not logged in as a registered user. Fan pages can be useful in helping the viral aspect of social media because "Joe became a fan of…" pops up on each persons wall (unless they turn it off or remove it) when they become a fan of your business.
Groups, on the other hand, allow you to send out bulk invitations (for instance, you can ask all of your friends to join the group) and any of your group members can also invite their friends. If you have "friends" on your Facebook page who are acquaintances or just share common interests this is a good way to market.
A group, however, has a limitation of 5,000 members if you wish to send a message. They are generally considered to be best for more personal interaction. I use a group, for example, to help people find online teaching jobs called "Make Money Teaching Online" where members share experiences, job tips and who's hiring. Group pages allow you to set other administrators to see who is requesting to join the group. If you post something to the group page, it will also show up on your personal wall. Some people don't like this because it ties them to their businesses, but this can be useful in creating a "person behind the online business" feeling with your customers. You have more control over participants and permissions with group memberships.
Both groups and fan pages allow you to create discussions and others to reply. Both have a wall for people to write on. Both allow you to share videos and pictures. Both require you to manually remove posts as an administrator if something does not meet your standards or purpose for the page. Both also allow you to create events.
Regardless of which one you choose (of course, you can have both), be sure to update regularly, keep your audience engaged and offer something of value. If you use your page or group purely for promotional reasons, you are far less likely to build loyalty, and there's a good chance that your members and friends won't be returning to your pages anytime soon.
Using Facebook to Get More Business (NY Times)
November 12, 2009
Small-Business Guide
How to Market Your Business With Facebook
By KERMIT PATTISON
Quick Tips:
Identify a short list of goals before you begin.
Show some personality in your page.
Don't shill. Use your page to engage-and trust that sales will follow.
Use Facebook data to analyze your customer demographics.
Suggested Resources:
A Facebook guide for advertisers.
http://www.facebook.com/advertising/
Advice on getting started from Mashable.
http://mashable.com/2009/09/22/facebook-pages-guide/
Strategies and a tutorial from All Facebook - "the unofficial Facebook resource."
http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/03/facebook-page-strategy/
Business owner, you might want to friend Facebook.
A growing number of businesses are making Facebook an indispensible part of hanging out their shingles. Small businesses are using it to find new customers, build online communities of fans and dig into gold mines of demographic information.
“You need to be where your customers are and your prospective customers are,” said Clara Shih, author of “The Facebook Era” (Pearson Education, 2009). “And with 300 million people on Facebook, and still growing, that’s increasingly where your audience is for a lot of products and services.”
Start Small
For most businesses, Facebook Pages (distinct from individual profiles and Facebook groups) are the best place to start. Pages allow businesses to collect “fans” the way celebrities, sports teams, musicians and politicians do. There are now 1.4 million Facebook Pages and they collect more than 10 million fans every day, according to the site.
Businesses can easily create a Web presence with Facebook, even if they don’t have their own Web site (most companies still should maintain a Web site to reach people who don’t use Facebook or whose employers block access to the site). Businesses can claim a vanity address so that their Facebook address reflects the business name, like www.facebook.com/Starbucks. Facebook pages can link to the company’s Web site or direct sales to e-commerce sites like Ticketmaster or Amazon.
Facebook offers an array of tools and networks, and it’s easy to wander down too many paths. Ms. Shih recommends that newcomers start by asking themselves a simple question: What is your basic objective? Is it getting more customers in the door? Building brand awareness? Creating a venue for customer support? Once you have set your goal, you can strategize accordingly.
“You can waste a lot of time on Facebook,” said Ms. Shih, founder of Hearsay Labs, a Facebook marketing software company. “But if you’re a business, you don’t have any time to waste. Figure out your objectives first, start small and do things that help you accomplish your objectives.”
Ms. Shih suggests that businesses ask friends and family to become fans of their pages so that they display a respectable crowd of supporters when they debut. Pages can grow organically by word of mouth — the average Facebook user has 130 friends on the site — or by advertising or promotion.
You can enliven your page with photos, comments and useful information. As you grow more comfortable, you can add videos or business applications. Flaunt your personality. The page of an ice cream parlor should feel different than that of a funeral parlor. “The pages that are most successful,” said Tim Kendall, the director of monetization at Facebook, “are the ones that really replicate the personality of the business.”
It’s Not All About Selling
Art Meets Commerce, a New York marketing firm, has struck up a never-ending conversation with fans. The company uses Facebook as a crucial part of its publicity campaigns for theatrical productions. Its Facebook page for the show “Rock of Ages,” for example, has more than 13,000 fans.
Staff members constantly update the page with new photos, videos and quotes from the cast. They’ve also learned what not to do: Once they posted a video of Paris Hilton plugging the show and got negative feedback from fans who professed to be sick of her.
But it’s not just about marketing — or, at least, it’s not just about selling. “You end up moving away from being an Internet marketer and go into almost customer service,” said Jim Glaub, creative director at the agency. “A lot of times people use Facebook to ask questions: What’s the student rush? How long is the show? Where’s parking? You have to answer.”
Some basic rules: Buy-buy-buy messages won’t fly. The best practitioners make Facebook less about selling and more about interacting. Engage with fans and critics. Listen to what people are saying, good and bad. You may even pick up ideas for how to improve your business. Keep content fresh. Use status updates and newsfeeds to tell fans about specials, events, contests or anything of interest.
These interactions can take a vast amount of time — the “Rock of Ages” page has 300 to 600 interactions every week — but they can also provide a big payoff. Facebook is one of the show’s top sources of new ticket sales.
Last year, Art Meets Commerce introduced a Facebook ad campaign to promote an Off Broadway run of the musical “Fela!” The campaign aimed at Facebook users with interests like theatrical shows or Afro beat. According to the company, it generated 18 million impressions, more than 5,700 clicks and $40,000 in ticket sales — all for $4,400 spent on advertising.
“We can advertise all day, but if we don’t give them what they want they will not be a fan anymore,” said Mark Seeley, a marketing associate at Art Meets Commerce. “Even though we represent the shows as marketers, we don’t want to constantly tell people to buy tickets. You talk to them like you talk to your friends on Facebook.”
Aim at Potential Customers Only
Some guys use Facebook to find single women. Chris Meyer used it to find women who are already engaged.
Mr. Meyer, a wedding photographer in Woodbury, Minn., had had little luck with traditional advertising. A full-page ad in a bridal magazine generated zero leads and a trade show yielded only four bookings, barely covering the cost of his booth. But Facebook proved a digital bonanza.
Mr. Meyer aimed at women ages 22 to 28 who listed their martial status as engaged in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. He estimates that he has spent about $300 on Facebook ads in the last two years and has generated more than $60,000 in business. He says about three-quarters of his clients now come to him through Facebook, either from ads or recommendations from friends.
“I’d be out of business if I didn’t have Facebook,” Mr. Meyer said. “Especially with this economy, I need to stretch each marketing dollar as much as I possibly can.”
Facebook enables small businesses to engage in targeted marketing that they only could have dreamed about a few years ago. Facebook users fill out profiles with information like hometown, employer, religious beliefs, interests, education and favorite books, movies and TV shows — all of which can help advertisers deliver messages to specific demographic slices.
As you create an ad, you can add demographic criteria and keywords and see how many Facebook users fall into your target audience and modify it accordingly to get the most bang for your buck. Advertisers can elect to pay per impression or per click, set maximum budgets and schedule the ad to run on specific dates.
Thus a coffee shop in San Francisco can display advertisements only to local people whose profiles or group affiliations suggest they like coffee. According to Mr. Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, ads can also aim at people based on social exchanges, like a person who sends a message to a friend, “let’s get together for coffee” or who posts a status update about just having awakened and needing some java.
“We can help you find customers before they even think about searching for you,” Mr. Kendall said. “We’re very, very well-positioned to generate demand, based on the fact that we know a tremendous amount about a user.”
The Facebook ad system provides instant feedback with metrics like the number of impressions and clicks-through. This reporting allows Mr. Meyer to improve his advertising; if one ad doesn’t generate enough hits within 24 hours, he pulls it and tries something new.
Give Away Cupcakes!
Charles Nelson has an M.B.A. and is a former investment banker who owns a growing national chain of stores. Yet this 40-year-old entrepreneur checks Facebook with the frequency of a college student. Up to 30 times a day, he logs onto the social networking site via his laptop or Blackberry.
For Mr. Nelson, this is serious business. He and his wife, Candace, own Sprinkles, a cupcake bakery that relies on social media in lieu of traditional advertising. Mr. Nelson considers Facebook marketing essential. “People are out there talking about your business everyday, whether you’re looking or not,” he said. “This gives people a place to come and speak directly to us.”
Sprinkles uses Facebook to give customers a whiff of what’s cooking. Every day it posts a password on Facebook that can be redeemed for a free cupcake. Since April, its fan base has risen tenfold to 70,000.
Mr. Nelson and his wife previously worked as investment bankers in the technology sector and were keenly aware that, even for a traditional business like a bakery, social media is a crucial ingredient. His advice: make it relevant to the customer, keep it fresh and remember that the return on investment may come slowly.
“Be patient with it,” Mr. Nelson advised. “People are not going to flock to your social media site overnight. Technology is about the network effect. It takes time for those connections to build.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/business/smallbusiness/12guide.html?em
Small-Business Guide
How to Market Your Business With Facebook
By KERMIT PATTISON
Quick Tips:
Identify a short list of goals before you begin.
Show some personality in your page.
Don't shill. Use your page to engage-and trust that sales will follow.
Use Facebook data to analyze your customer demographics.
Suggested Resources:
A Facebook guide for advertisers.
http://www.facebook.com/advertising/
Advice on getting started from Mashable.
http://mashable.com/2009/09/22/facebook-pages-guide/
Strategies and a tutorial from All Facebook - "the unofficial Facebook resource."
http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/03/facebook-page-strategy/
Business owner, you might want to friend Facebook.
A growing number of businesses are making Facebook an indispensible part of hanging out their shingles. Small businesses are using it to find new customers, build online communities of fans and dig into gold mines of demographic information.
“You need to be where your customers are and your prospective customers are,” said Clara Shih, author of “The Facebook Era” (Pearson Education, 2009). “And with 300 million people on Facebook, and still growing, that’s increasingly where your audience is for a lot of products and services.”
Start Small
For most businesses, Facebook Pages (distinct from individual profiles and Facebook groups) are the best place to start. Pages allow businesses to collect “fans” the way celebrities, sports teams, musicians and politicians do. There are now 1.4 million Facebook Pages and they collect more than 10 million fans every day, according to the site.
Businesses can easily create a Web presence with Facebook, even if they don’t have their own Web site (most companies still should maintain a Web site to reach people who don’t use Facebook or whose employers block access to the site). Businesses can claim a vanity address so that their Facebook address reflects the business name, like www.facebook.com/Starbucks. Facebook pages can link to the company’s Web site or direct sales to e-commerce sites like Ticketmaster or Amazon.
Facebook offers an array of tools and networks, and it’s easy to wander down too many paths. Ms. Shih recommends that newcomers start by asking themselves a simple question: What is your basic objective? Is it getting more customers in the door? Building brand awareness? Creating a venue for customer support? Once you have set your goal, you can strategize accordingly.
“You can waste a lot of time on Facebook,” said Ms. Shih, founder of Hearsay Labs, a Facebook marketing software company. “But if you’re a business, you don’t have any time to waste. Figure out your objectives first, start small and do things that help you accomplish your objectives.”
Ms. Shih suggests that businesses ask friends and family to become fans of their pages so that they display a respectable crowd of supporters when they debut. Pages can grow organically by word of mouth — the average Facebook user has 130 friends on the site — or by advertising or promotion.
You can enliven your page with photos, comments and useful information. As you grow more comfortable, you can add videos or business applications. Flaunt your personality. The page of an ice cream parlor should feel different than that of a funeral parlor. “The pages that are most successful,” said Tim Kendall, the director of monetization at Facebook, “are the ones that really replicate the personality of the business.”
It’s Not All About Selling
Art Meets Commerce, a New York marketing firm, has struck up a never-ending conversation with fans. The company uses Facebook as a crucial part of its publicity campaigns for theatrical productions. Its Facebook page for the show “Rock of Ages,” for example, has more than 13,000 fans.
Staff members constantly update the page with new photos, videos and quotes from the cast. They’ve also learned what not to do: Once they posted a video of Paris Hilton plugging the show and got negative feedback from fans who professed to be sick of her.
But it’s not just about marketing — or, at least, it’s not just about selling. “You end up moving away from being an Internet marketer and go into almost customer service,” said Jim Glaub, creative director at the agency. “A lot of times people use Facebook to ask questions: What’s the student rush? How long is the show? Where’s parking? You have to answer.”
Some basic rules: Buy-buy-buy messages won’t fly. The best practitioners make Facebook less about selling and more about interacting. Engage with fans and critics. Listen to what people are saying, good and bad. You may even pick up ideas for how to improve your business. Keep content fresh. Use status updates and newsfeeds to tell fans about specials, events, contests or anything of interest.
These interactions can take a vast amount of time — the “Rock of Ages” page has 300 to 600 interactions every week — but they can also provide a big payoff. Facebook is one of the show’s top sources of new ticket sales.
Last year, Art Meets Commerce introduced a Facebook ad campaign to promote an Off Broadway run of the musical “Fela!” The campaign aimed at Facebook users with interests like theatrical shows or Afro beat. According to the company, it generated 18 million impressions, more than 5,700 clicks and $40,000 in ticket sales — all for $4,400 spent on advertising.
“We can advertise all day, but if we don’t give them what they want they will not be a fan anymore,” said Mark Seeley, a marketing associate at Art Meets Commerce. “Even though we represent the shows as marketers, we don’t want to constantly tell people to buy tickets. You talk to them like you talk to your friends on Facebook.”
Aim at Potential Customers Only
Some guys use Facebook to find single women. Chris Meyer used it to find women who are already engaged.
Mr. Meyer, a wedding photographer in Woodbury, Minn., had had little luck with traditional advertising. A full-page ad in a bridal magazine generated zero leads and a trade show yielded only four bookings, barely covering the cost of his booth. But Facebook proved a digital bonanza.
Mr. Meyer aimed at women ages 22 to 28 who listed their martial status as engaged in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. He estimates that he has spent about $300 on Facebook ads in the last two years and has generated more than $60,000 in business. He says about three-quarters of his clients now come to him through Facebook, either from ads or recommendations from friends.
“I’d be out of business if I didn’t have Facebook,” Mr. Meyer said. “Especially with this economy, I need to stretch each marketing dollar as much as I possibly can.”
Facebook enables small businesses to engage in targeted marketing that they only could have dreamed about a few years ago. Facebook users fill out profiles with information like hometown, employer, religious beliefs, interests, education and favorite books, movies and TV shows — all of which can help advertisers deliver messages to specific demographic slices.
As you create an ad, you can add demographic criteria and keywords and see how many Facebook users fall into your target audience and modify it accordingly to get the most bang for your buck. Advertisers can elect to pay per impression or per click, set maximum budgets and schedule the ad to run on specific dates.
Thus a coffee shop in San Francisco can display advertisements only to local people whose profiles or group affiliations suggest they like coffee. According to Mr. Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, ads can also aim at people based on social exchanges, like a person who sends a message to a friend, “let’s get together for coffee” or who posts a status update about just having awakened and needing some java.
“We can help you find customers before they even think about searching for you,” Mr. Kendall said. “We’re very, very well-positioned to generate demand, based on the fact that we know a tremendous amount about a user.”
The Facebook ad system provides instant feedback with metrics like the number of impressions and clicks-through. This reporting allows Mr. Meyer to improve his advertising; if one ad doesn’t generate enough hits within 24 hours, he pulls it and tries something new.
Give Away Cupcakes!
Charles Nelson has an M.B.A. and is a former investment banker who owns a growing national chain of stores. Yet this 40-year-old entrepreneur checks Facebook with the frequency of a college student. Up to 30 times a day, he logs onto the social networking site via his laptop or Blackberry.
For Mr. Nelson, this is serious business. He and his wife, Candace, own Sprinkles, a cupcake bakery that relies on social media in lieu of traditional advertising. Mr. Nelson considers Facebook marketing essential. “People are out there talking about your business everyday, whether you’re looking or not,” he said. “This gives people a place to come and speak directly to us.”
Sprinkles uses Facebook to give customers a whiff of what’s cooking. Every day it posts a password on Facebook that can be redeemed for a free cupcake. Since April, its fan base has risen tenfold to 70,000.
Mr. Nelson and his wife previously worked as investment bankers in the technology sector and were keenly aware that, even for a traditional business like a bakery, social media is a crucial ingredient. His advice: make it relevant to the customer, keep it fresh and remember that the return on investment may come slowly.
“Be patient with it,” Mr. Nelson advised. “People are not going to flock to your social media site overnight. Technology is about the network effect. It takes time for those connections to build.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/business/smallbusiness/12guide.html?em
Award Program for Small Businesses
"Shine A Light" program recognizes small businesses. Nominations welcome at nbc.com/shinealight
American Express, in partnership with NBC Universal, invites you to share a story about a small business you find inspiring and nominate it for an opportunity to win $100,000 in grant and marketing support for that business. If you don't have a story to share, you can participate by viewing, endorsing or voting on other nominated stories. Business Owners: nominate your own business. Lots of marketing materials available at http://shinealight.ivillage.com/
American Express, in partnership with NBC Universal, invites you to share a story about a small business you find inspiring and nominate it for an opportunity to win $100,000 in grant and marketing support for that business. If you don't have a story to share, you can participate by viewing, endorsing or voting on other nominated stories. Business Owners: nominate your own business. Lots of marketing materials available at http://shinealight.ivillage.com/
How to Make Money with Twitter (from Forbes)
Entrepreneurs
Twenty-One Top Twitter Tips
Daniel Adler 07.31.09, 6:15 PM ET
You've heard about Twitter--that curious, strangely addictive social-networking technology that facilitates torrents of truncated messages among millions of users. You might even know your hashtags from your re-tweets. But how can you make money with it?
Forbes canvassed scads of businesses and pricey social-networking gurus looking for honest answers. Admittedly, we were skeptical. After all, how much can you accomplish in 140 characters or less?
Turns out there are myriad ways Twitter can have an impact, and not just as a marginal marketing tool. Indeed, we found 21 clever ways to use Twitter--for everything from boosting sales and scouting talent, to conducting market research and raising capital. Chances are, there will be many more.
"I believe Twitter is a communication platform," says Nathan Egan, founder of Freesource Agency, a social-networking consultancy in Philadelphia. "In a year or two, everyone will be on it, using it in totally new ways." Better yet, getting results "doesn't take a year or six months, but a matter of weeks," adds Mark Schaefer, head of Schaefer Marketing Solutions in Knoxville, Tenn.
Some strategies take more time, or are more industry-specific, than others. Taken together, though, this collection of techniques and real-world examples constitutes a powerful online arsenal for companies large and small. Herewith, some highlights:
Coupon Campaigns
Congratulations for getting to the end of this sentence. "As an online culture, people are not reading; they're scanning," says Dell Computer's Stefanie Nelson, voice of @DellOutlet. "The shorter and more direct your message is, the more successful you're going to be." Dell tweets links to coupons at Dell Outlet's Facebook page, which shoppers use during checkout at Dell.com.
This strategy works for small companies, too: The abbreviated offers are easy to produce--you don't need an ad agency to write 140 characters. California Tortilla, a chain of 39 causal Mexican restaurants based in Rockville, Md., spread coupon "passwords"--through its Twitter feed @caltort--that must be spoken at checkout to be redeemed.
Viral Marketing
In July, in honor of its 10th birthday, London-based do-it-yourself Web site builder Moonfruit gave away 11 Macbook Pro computers and 10 iPod Touches. Contestants had to tweet using the hashtag #moonfruit. (Hashtags collate Twitter responses.) Nearly a month after the contest ended, traffic to Moonfruit's Web site is up 300%. Sales are up 20% this month, more than paying off the $15,000 investment. And the Moonfruit Web site has climbed onto the first Google page for "free website builder" (it used to be on the fourth).
Word to the wise, says Moonfruit founder Wendy White: Such campaigns must be courteous and fit with a company's brand, lest you draw the ire of the Twitter-sphere: "There's a fine line between annoying people and getting the thumbs up."
Artful Customer Service
Frank Eliason, director of digital care at Comcast, uses Twitter to help 200 to 300 subscribers a day with issues ranging from sporadic Internet service to errant e-mails. Frank and his team receive direct questions at the @comcastcares account and search for complaints. Twitter has a built-in search, but it's more efficient to set up a permanent search on one of the free, third-party Twitter applications, such as TweetDeck.
Eliason's key to success: maintaining friendly relationships, not foisting unwanted advice. "If they want assistance, they'll let me know," he says. Eliason has a 10-person help desk at his disposal, but small businesses can use Twitter to provide better customer service, too. Even a little help goes a long way.
Focus Groups
Back in the old days (last year), companies actually paid customers to solicit their opinions. There were 3.37 million mentions of Starbucks on Twitter through early May 2009, and all of that information is available for less than the cost of a frappucino. "There is a major element of Twitter that's about listening and learning," says Brad Nelson, the man behind @Starbucks. "Twitter is a leading indicator." Collecting the information is as simple as searching for references to your company.
Morgan Johnston, manager of Corporate Communications at Jet Blue, abolished a $50 fee for carry-on bikes after hearing complaints via Twitter. "Think of Twitter as the canary in the coal mine," says Johnston. "We watch for customers' discussions about amenities we have, and what they'd like to see made better." For a more formal approach, lob a simple post asking for feedback and provide a hashtag to collect the responses.
Poaching Customers
"Twitter is not just a kid story," says Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs. Brogan should know: He is one of several Twitter experts advising companies on how to spy on their competition and to swoop in with a better service or discount.
Freesource's Egan describes how to do it: Using TweetDeck, set up a permanent search for all permutations of your competitor's name, as well as words that convey dissatisfaction ("sucks" or "hate"). Public replies to those new prospects are dangerous, as your competition may see them, so the best bet is to follow them and get followed back, allowing you to send direct messages.
Customer Expectation Management
Bad things happen--it's how you condition customers to deal with it that counts. Jet Blue tweets flight delays. In April, when a Stanley Cup broadcast was interrupted, cable provider Comcast used Twitter to immediately inform its subscribers that the culprit was a lightning storm, and that transmission would soon be restored.
Small companies--like United Linen, a linens and uniform company in Bartlesville, Okla.--can manage expectations this way, too. When a major snowstorm hit the area, Marketing Director Scott Townsend used Twitter to let customers know deliveries would be delayed. "It was a great way to send information to everyone," he says. "They understood we wouldn't be there, but they wanted to know what our status was and updates as the situation changed."
Corralling Eyeballs
During last year's NBA Eastern Conference Finals between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Orlando Magic, Turner Broadcasting managed to weave social-media feeds into its home page. Fans accessed the conversation by logging onto Twitter through TNT.com, and the tweets were also posted on Twitter with links back to TNT.com. Those forums mean more Web traffic--and thus more advertising revenue. "It's exciting to sell this to an advertiser," said Liza Hausman, vice president of marketing for Gigya Socialize, the brains behind the integration technology.
Vendor Selection
Twitter can snag customers, but how about suppliers? Crowdspring, an online marketplace that marries businesses with graphic designers (see "The Creativity Of Crowds "), used Twitter to build up its stable of contributors--now 12,000 strong globally.
Business travelers can apply this same logic: Tweeting that you're about to visit a city can scare up discount offers from hotels, bus companies and other travel-services providers.
Conflict Resolution
Wiggly Wigglers, a Herfordshire, U.K.-based marketer of gardening and farming supplies, was recently overcharged $10,500 by British Telecom. Five months passed without restitution.
Finally, Wiggly owner Heather Gorringe hit the Twitter-sphere, asking if anyone else had had problems with BT. @BTCare sent Gorringe a message within 30 minutes promising help; two days later, the bill was amended. "When I phone them up, I'm an isolated call to deal with, so I'm less important," says Gorringe. "But if I tweet, and 1,193 people re-tweet, 100,000 people see it within 30 seconds."
Employee Recruitment
Sodexo, a food services and facilities management company, trains its recruiters on Twitter and other social media. An automated program sends prospects a direct message whenever a position opens up, and the messages are opened 30% of the time.
The trick, says Arie Ball, vice president of talent acquisition at Sodexo, is to be as personal and engaging as possible: "People get an insider's view, a sense if this is a company they want to work for." The company says that using Twitter as a recruitment tool has helped cut its investment in online job boards by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Raising Capital
As in the physical world, no one likes to be solicited for contributions online. A better Twitter tack: Don't ask, just inform.
Last Thanksgiving, Epic Change, a nonprofit that encourages people to tell their stories to transform communities, launched the Tweetsgiving Web site, with the help of theKbuzz, a word-of-mouth marketing firm. Tweetsgiving asked people to tweet what they were grateful for, and compiled the responses at #tweetsgiving, with a link back to the Tweetsgiving site, where users had the option of contributing money to build classrooms in Tanzania.
Over the 48-hour campaign, 15,000 people came to the Tweetsgiving site; 360 donated, for a total of $11,000. "We never asked people to give," says Stacey Monk, founder of Epic Change. "We got people invested in their own, personalized way."
Twenty-One Top Twitter Tips
Daniel Adler 07.31.09, 6:15 PM ET
You've heard about Twitter--that curious, strangely addictive social-networking technology that facilitates torrents of truncated messages among millions of users. You might even know your hashtags from your re-tweets. But how can you make money with it?
Forbes canvassed scads of businesses and pricey social-networking gurus looking for honest answers. Admittedly, we were skeptical. After all, how much can you accomplish in 140 characters or less?
Turns out there are myriad ways Twitter can have an impact, and not just as a marginal marketing tool. Indeed, we found 21 clever ways to use Twitter--for everything from boosting sales and scouting talent, to conducting market research and raising capital. Chances are, there will be many more.
"I believe Twitter is a communication platform," says Nathan Egan, founder of Freesource Agency, a social-networking consultancy in Philadelphia. "In a year or two, everyone will be on it, using it in totally new ways." Better yet, getting results "doesn't take a year or six months, but a matter of weeks," adds Mark Schaefer, head of Schaefer Marketing Solutions in Knoxville, Tenn.
Some strategies take more time, or are more industry-specific, than others. Taken together, though, this collection of techniques and real-world examples constitutes a powerful online arsenal for companies large and small. Herewith, some highlights:
Coupon Campaigns
Congratulations for getting to the end of this sentence. "As an online culture, people are not reading; they're scanning," says Dell Computer's Stefanie Nelson, voice of @DellOutlet. "The shorter and more direct your message is, the more successful you're going to be." Dell tweets links to coupons at Dell Outlet's Facebook page, which shoppers use during checkout at Dell.com.
This strategy works for small companies, too: The abbreviated offers are easy to produce--you don't need an ad agency to write 140 characters. California Tortilla, a chain of 39 causal Mexican restaurants based in Rockville, Md., spread coupon "passwords"--through its Twitter feed @caltort--that must be spoken at checkout to be redeemed.
Viral Marketing
In July, in honor of its 10th birthday, London-based do-it-yourself Web site builder Moonfruit gave away 11 Macbook Pro computers and 10 iPod Touches. Contestants had to tweet using the hashtag #moonfruit. (Hashtags collate Twitter responses.) Nearly a month after the contest ended, traffic to Moonfruit's Web site is up 300%. Sales are up 20% this month, more than paying off the $15,000 investment. And the Moonfruit Web site has climbed onto the first Google page for "free website builder" (it used to be on the fourth).
Word to the wise, says Moonfruit founder Wendy White: Such campaigns must be courteous and fit with a company's brand, lest you draw the ire of the Twitter-sphere: "There's a fine line between annoying people and getting the thumbs up."
Artful Customer Service
Frank Eliason, director of digital care at Comcast, uses Twitter to help 200 to 300 subscribers a day with issues ranging from sporadic Internet service to errant e-mails. Frank and his team receive direct questions at the @comcastcares account and search for complaints. Twitter has a built-in search, but it's more efficient to set up a permanent search on one of the free, third-party Twitter applications, such as TweetDeck.
Eliason's key to success: maintaining friendly relationships, not foisting unwanted advice. "If they want assistance, they'll let me know," he says. Eliason has a 10-person help desk at his disposal, but small businesses can use Twitter to provide better customer service, too. Even a little help goes a long way.
Focus Groups
Back in the old days (last year), companies actually paid customers to solicit their opinions. There were 3.37 million mentions of Starbucks on Twitter through early May 2009, and all of that information is available for less than the cost of a frappucino. "There is a major element of Twitter that's about listening and learning," says Brad Nelson, the man behind @Starbucks. "Twitter is a leading indicator." Collecting the information is as simple as searching for references to your company.
Morgan Johnston, manager of Corporate Communications at Jet Blue, abolished a $50 fee for carry-on bikes after hearing complaints via Twitter. "Think of Twitter as the canary in the coal mine," says Johnston. "We watch for customers' discussions about amenities we have, and what they'd like to see made better." For a more formal approach, lob a simple post asking for feedback and provide a hashtag to collect the responses.
Poaching Customers
"Twitter is not just a kid story," says Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs. Brogan should know: He is one of several Twitter experts advising companies on how to spy on their competition and to swoop in with a better service or discount.
Freesource's Egan describes how to do it: Using TweetDeck, set up a permanent search for all permutations of your competitor's name, as well as words that convey dissatisfaction ("sucks" or "hate"). Public replies to those new prospects are dangerous, as your competition may see them, so the best bet is to follow them and get followed back, allowing you to send direct messages.
Customer Expectation Management
Bad things happen--it's how you condition customers to deal with it that counts. Jet Blue tweets flight delays. In April, when a Stanley Cup broadcast was interrupted, cable provider Comcast used Twitter to immediately inform its subscribers that the culprit was a lightning storm, and that transmission would soon be restored.
Small companies--like United Linen, a linens and uniform company in Bartlesville, Okla.--can manage expectations this way, too. When a major snowstorm hit the area, Marketing Director Scott Townsend used Twitter to let customers know deliveries would be delayed. "It was a great way to send information to everyone," he says. "They understood we wouldn't be there, but they wanted to know what our status was and updates as the situation changed."
Corralling Eyeballs
During last year's NBA Eastern Conference Finals between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Orlando Magic, Turner Broadcasting managed to weave social-media feeds into its home page. Fans accessed the conversation by logging onto Twitter through TNT.com, and the tweets were also posted on Twitter with links back to TNT.com. Those forums mean more Web traffic--and thus more advertising revenue. "It's exciting to sell this to an advertiser," said Liza Hausman, vice president of marketing for Gigya Socialize, the brains behind the integration technology.
Vendor Selection
Twitter can snag customers, but how about suppliers? Crowdspring, an online marketplace that marries businesses with graphic designers (see "The Creativity Of Crowds "), used Twitter to build up its stable of contributors--now 12,000 strong globally.
Business travelers can apply this same logic: Tweeting that you're about to visit a city can scare up discount offers from hotels, bus companies and other travel-services providers.
Conflict Resolution
Wiggly Wigglers, a Herfordshire, U.K.-based marketer of gardening and farming supplies, was recently overcharged $10,500 by British Telecom. Five months passed without restitution.
Finally, Wiggly owner Heather Gorringe hit the Twitter-sphere, asking if anyone else had had problems with BT. @BTCare sent Gorringe a message within 30 minutes promising help; two days later, the bill was amended. "When I phone them up, I'm an isolated call to deal with, so I'm less important," says Gorringe. "But if I tweet, and 1,193 people re-tweet, 100,000 people see it within 30 seconds."
Employee Recruitment
Sodexo, a food services and facilities management company, trains its recruiters on Twitter and other social media. An automated program sends prospects a direct message whenever a position opens up, and the messages are opened 30% of the time.
The trick, says Arie Ball, vice president of talent acquisition at Sodexo, is to be as personal and engaging as possible: "People get an insider's view, a sense if this is a company they want to work for." The company says that using Twitter as a recruitment tool has helped cut its investment in online job boards by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Raising Capital
As in the physical world, no one likes to be solicited for contributions online. A better Twitter tack: Don't ask, just inform.
Last Thanksgiving, Epic Change, a nonprofit that encourages people to tell their stories to transform communities, launched the Tweetsgiving Web site, with the help of theKbuzz, a word-of-mouth marketing firm. Tweetsgiving asked people to tweet what they were grateful for, and compiled the responses at #tweetsgiving, with a link back to the Tweetsgiving site, where users had the option of contributing money to build classrooms in Tanzania.
Over the 48-hour campaign, 15,000 people came to the Tweetsgiving site; 360 donated, for a total of $11,000. "We never asked people to give," says Stacey Monk, founder of Epic Change. "We got people invested in their own, personalized way."
WSJ - optimize your Search Engine Optimization Results
THE DECODER FEBRUARY 5, 2009 It's a New Me (As Seen on Google)
By JULIA ANGWIN
Article
For years, I winced at what popped up when I Googled my name.
The top result of a search on "Julia Angwin" was an article I wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 2005 after I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was indicted for leaking the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
How Are Your Google Results?
Have you tried to change the search results for your name? What worked? What didn't?
I hated seeing the story at the top of the list for a number of reasons: It was not a topic I normally wrote about; it had an underwhelming headline, "Novak's Role is Still Largely Unknown"; and -- most horrifyingly -- the story contained an error and had a correction appended to it.
Mysteriously, this article had become my hallmark online, showing up in my top-five search results for years. As a longtime media and technology reporter who is coming out with a book, I didn't feel the article represented my career. So a few months ago, I began trying to figure out how I could knock that story -- and a few others, while I was at it -- out of my search results. It was the beginning of a long and arduous introduction into the murky art of search-engine optimization, or SEO.
Lisa HaneyOne of the paradoxes of the digital age is that the boundless freedoms of the Internet also constrain our identity. Before the ubiquity of search engines you could go on a date or a job interview and construct a narrative about your life that fit the situation. No one in your book group had to know that you were a punk-rocker in high school. But it's much harder to package yourself in the Google era. Online, your digital identity often comes down to the top 10 links on your SERP, or search-engine results page.
Of course, Google is not the Internet's only search engine. But since it is the most dominant one, I only focused on improving my Google SERP.
My first thought was to try to remove the unwanted article from my SERP. But search-engine expert and consultant Danny Sullivan advised me that it is extremely difficult to remove items from Google search results.
If you can prove to Google that a Web site has stolen your Social Security, credit card or bank-account numbers and posted them online, then Google will consider removing the offending data, he said. Even in those cases, Google urges people to contact the Web site directly to seek removal. "They don't really intervene unless there is some good legal reason to do that," Mr. Sullivan told me.
Still, Google does encourage people to boost their results by creating content about themselves. "People should take control of their own presence," says Adam Lasnik, search expert at Google. The best way to do that, he advises, is to create original compelling content about yourself that is easily accessed by Google and earns links from authoritative and relevant Web sites.
For details, I turned to WSJ.com's search-engine-optimization consultant Alex Bennert, who advised me to bury the annoying article underneath more favorable material, such as my social-networking profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace, as well as blogging site Twitter.
Next, I contacted Rhea Drysdale, a search-engine-optimization expert at OutspokenMedia.com. Ms. Drysdale explained that I needed to focus on linking my online presences to each other -- that is, my Twitter page would link to my LinkedIn page, which would link to my biography on my book-publisher's site. These interlinkages are key to understanding Google's page-ranking system. Google rates Web sites, in part, by how many links they have from other credible Web sites.
Ms. Drysdale explained that this interlinkage system was the reason that my Novak article had been appearing so high in my SERP. Using Yahoo's Site Explorer, a tool that identifies sites that are linking to a Web address, she found that the Novak article had 25 links from sites that included the Washington Post, Instapundit and 13 different places in the archives of a conservative blog.
By interlinking my sites, my efforts soon began to pay off. Two weeks into the project, the Novak article disappeared from the first page of my results. My LinkedIn profile jumped to the No. 1 spot.
“One lesson: You can work to boost your results, and then lose control in an instant.”
Soon, my results got another boost as I launched a new blog and a column on WSJ.com. Within a month of the launch of both, traffic and links to these sites pushed two older articles I had written down or off my top results altogether. Of course, it's easier for me to move my results because I'm a journalist. Every time I publish a new article on WSJ.com, it immediately becomes part of my SERP equation.
For most non-journalists who do not maintain their own blog or Web site, it's a bit harder to create such a steady stream of new content on topics they want to associate with themselves. But it's not impossible. Ms. Drysdale recommends submitting articles to Web sites such as Squidoo.com, eHow.com or Google Knol on topics on that show off your expertise. "It's a huge branding opportunity," she says.
Still, visibility has a downside, which I unwittingly learned. The day that Apple Inc.'s Chief Executive Steve Jobs announced his "hormonal imbalance," I went on camera with a colleague at WSJ.com to talk about the possible impact on Apple's business.
Within hours, Apple enthusiasts at MacDailyNews.com started trash-talking me and my colleague for allegedly casting aspersions on their leader. As a result, these posts, some of them quite vulgar and nasty, shot up near the top of my search-results page. Luckily, they sank back down to the fourth page of my results within two days.
The whole unpleasant experience was an object lesson in another aspect of SEO: It's never over. You can work to boost your results, and then lose control in an instant. Constant vigilance is required. That's why big companies hire experts to monitor their search results on a full-time basis.
Still, I hoped to strike the knockout blow for my SERP with the creation of a new personal Web site. With its launch approaching, I sent it to Ms. Drysdale, who made some specific technical recommendations. The front page was too graphical, she said. It needed to have more text that Google could categorize when its systems examined the site, a process called crawling. So the Web designer I was working with changed some of the text to make it more crawlable, sacrificing a beautiful typeface on the altar of SEO.
She also weighed in on the importance of the text and coding -- some of it invisible -- called metadata that's embedded in a Web site that helps search engines categorize the content. When building a page, Web programmers include a "title tag," which is displayed at the top of the Web browser and describes the page to a search engine.
For example, The Wall Street Journal's home page has a title tag that reads: "Business News, Finance News, World, Political & Sports News from The Wall Street Journal - WSJ.com." All those words help search engines categorize the content and are the exact words that appear in a Google search result.
Once my title tags and metadata were optimized, the site went live.
At Ms. Drysdale's recommendation, I used Twitter to "tweet" about the site, sending out a short text message. I also linked to my site from my Facebook and LinkedIn pages, as well as my "WSJ Community" profile.
For several days, I was greeted with a deafening silence. My SERP changed not at all as the site worked its way through the circuits at Google. Finally, 10 days later, my site appeared on the ninth page of my results and began slowly bubbling its way up to the top of my SERP.
And thus, I learned the final lesson of SEO: Patience is required.
Write to Julia Angwin at julia.angwin@wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D1
Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit
www.djreprints.com
By JULIA ANGWIN
Article
For years, I winced at what popped up when I Googled my name.
The top result of a search on "Julia Angwin" was an article I wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 2005 after I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was indicted for leaking the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
How Are Your Google Results?
Have you tried to change the search results for your name? What worked? What didn't?
I hated seeing the story at the top of the list for a number of reasons: It was not a topic I normally wrote about; it had an underwhelming headline, "Novak's Role is Still Largely Unknown"; and -- most horrifyingly -- the story contained an error and had a correction appended to it.
Mysteriously, this article had become my hallmark online, showing up in my top-five search results for years. As a longtime media and technology reporter who is coming out with a book, I didn't feel the article represented my career. So a few months ago, I began trying to figure out how I could knock that story -- and a few others, while I was at it -- out of my search results. It was the beginning of a long and arduous introduction into the murky art of search-engine optimization, or SEO.
Lisa HaneyOne of the paradoxes of the digital age is that the boundless freedoms of the Internet also constrain our identity. Before the ubiquity of search engines you could go on a date or a job interview and construct a narrative about your life that fit the situation. No one in your book group had to know that you were a punk-rocker in high school. But it's much harder to package yourself in the Google era. Online, your digital identity often comes down to the top 10 links on your SERP, or search-engine results page.
Of course, Google is not the Internet's only search engine. But since it is the most dominant one, I only focused on improving my Google SERP.
My first thought was to try to remove the unwanted article from my SERP. But search-engine expert and consultant Danny Sullivan advised me that it is extremely difficult to remove items from Google search results.
If you can prove to Google that a Web site has stolen your Social Security, credit card or bank-account numbers and posted them online, then Google will consider removing the offending data, he said. Even in those cases, Google urges people to contact the Web site directly to seek removal. "They don't really intervene unless there is some good legal reason to do that," Mr. Sullivan told me.
Still, Google does encourage people to boost their results by creating content about themselves. "People should take control of their own presence," says Adam Lasnik, search expert at Google. The best way to do that, he advises, is to create original compelling content about yourself that is easily accessed by Google and earns links from authoritative and relevant Web sites.
For details, I turned to WSJ.com's search-engine-optimization consultant Alex Bennert, who advised me to bury the annoying article underneath more favorable material, such as my social-networking profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace, as well as blogging site Twitter.
Next, I contacted Rhea Drysdale, a search-engine-optimization expert at OutspokenMedia.com. Ms. Drysdale explained that I needed to focus on linking my online presences to each other -- that is, my Twitter page would link to my LinkedIn page, which would link to my biography on my book-publisher's site. These interlinkages are key to understanding Google's page-ranking system. Google rates Web sites, in part, by how many links they have from other credible Web sites.
Ms. Drysdale explained that this interlinkage system was the reason that my Novak article had been appearing so high in my SERP. Using Yahoo's Site Explorer, a tool that identifies sites that are linking to a Web address, she found that the Novak article had 25 links from sites that included the Washington Post, Instapundit and 13 different places in the archives of a conservative blog.
By interlinking my sites, my efforts soon began to pay off. Two weeks into the project, the Novak article disappeared from the first page of my results. My LinkedIn profile jumped to the No. 1 spot.
“One lesson: You can work to boost your results, and then lose control in an instant.”
Soon, my results got another boost as I launched a new blog and a column on WSJ.com. Within a month of the launch of both, traffic and links to these sites pushed two older articles I had written down or off my top results altogether. Of course, it's easier for me to move my results because I'm a journalist. Every time I publish a new article on WSJ.com, it immediately becomes part of my SERP equation.
For most non-journalists who do not maintain their own blog or Web site, it's a bit harder to create such a steady stream of new content on topics they want to associate with themselves. But it's not impossible. Ms. Drysdale recommends submitting articles to Web sites such as Squidoo.com, eHow.com or Google Knol on topics on that show off your expertise. "It's a huge branding opportunity," she says.
Still, visibility has a downside, which I unwittingly learned. The day that Apple Inc.'s Chief Executive Steve Jobs announced his "hormonal imbalance," I went on camera with a colleague at WSJ.com to talk about the possible impact on Apple's business.
Within hours, Apple enthusiasts at MacDailyNews.com started trash-talking me and my colleague for allegedly casting aspersions on their leader. As a result, these posts, some of them quite vulgar and nasty, shot up near the top of my search-results page. Luckily, they sank back down to the fourth page of my results within two days.
The whole unpleasant experience was an object lesson in another aspect of SEO: It's never over. You can work to boost your results, and then lose control in an instant. Constant vigilance is required. That's why big companies hire experts to monitor their search results on a full-time basis.
Still, I hoped to strike the knockout blow for my SERP with the creation of a new personal Web site. With its launch approaching, I sent it to Ms. Drysdale, who made some specific technical recommendations. The front page was too graphical, she said. It needed to have more text that Google could categorize when its systems examined the site, a process called crawling. So the Web designer I was working with changed some of the text to make it more crawlable, sacrificing a beautiful typeface on the altar of SEO.
She also weighed in on the importance of the text and coding -- some of it invisible -- called metadata that's embedded in a Web site that helps search engines categorize the content. When building a page, Web programmers include a "title tag," which is displayed at the top of the Web browser and describes the page to a search engine.
For example, The Wall Street Journal's home page has a title tag that reads: "Business News, Finance News, World, Political & Sports News from The Wall Street Journal - WSJ.com." All those words help search engines categorize the content and are the exact words that appear in a Google search result.
Once my title tags and metadata were optimized, the site went live.
At Ms. Drysdale's recommendation, I used Twitter to "tweet" about the site, sending out a short text message. I also linked to my site from my Facebook and LinkedIn pages, as well as my "WSJ Community" profile.
For several days, I was greeted with a deafening silence. My SERP changed not at all as the site worked its way through the circuits at Google. Finally, 10 days later, my site appeared on the ninth page of my results and began slowly bubbling its way up to the top of my SERP.
And thus, I learned the final lesson of SEO: Patience is required.
Write to Julia Angwin at julia.angwin@wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D1
Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit
www.djreprints.com
Entrepreneur.com - How to Get Your Emails Read
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Top Secret: Get Your E-mails Opened
Derek Gehl
Entrepreneur.com
As the economy continues along its unsteady path, many small-business owners have been asking me what they can do to keep their businesses financially healthy over the coming months.
I recommend you start by leveraging the tools you already have, and making sure you're using them as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Take your e-mail marketing, for instance. When you stay in touch with your regular customers and subscribers--and send them valuable information--they'll view you as a credible resource, an expert in your field, and most important, someone who's watching out for their best interests.
And they'll reward you with their loyalty (and continued purchases).
But first you have to get those e-mails opened.
With floods of e-mail arriving every hour, most people are ruthless about deleting anything they even suspect won't interest them. Not only that, they're also just as likely to report unwanted e-mails as spam as they are to delete them. So if you're not writing compelling subject lines that get the e-mails opened, all your hard work is lost.
Here are five tips for writing effective e-mail subject lines that can easily double the open (and click-through) rates on your next e-mail.
Tip #1:Use personalization for added attention
Sending out an e-mail with a personalized subject line is the equivalent of calling someone's name in a crowd: It has that same power to grab his attention.
By now, using the recipient's name in your subject line is pretty standard. But that's only the start. You can take personalization further by adding another personal detail to the subject line, like the city your customers live in.
Start with a subject line that looks like this: "Janet, want to get out of the city this weekend?"
Then make it really compelling by adding personal details: "Janet, want to get out of Tucson this weekend?"
A DoubleClick survey found that the most important factor in generating a response was offering a product the recipients wanted at the time. You can accomplish that by segmenting your market, allowing you to personalize the offers or the information in your e-mails to make them timely and relevant.
That means collecting as much data as possible on each person on your mailing list. Then you can create separate campaigns that will appeal to each segment of your audience (e.g., subscribers; people who have purchased once; and people who have purchased more than once).
If your offer is highly personalized, your subject lines can be, too.
And the great thing is that there are plenty of tools out there that can manage and merge in your data to create targeted e-mail campaigns. (We likeiContact.com.)
Tip #2:Keep your subject lines short
Here's a test: Take a look at the subject lines in your inbox. Are there any that stand out more than others? Any that you read first or get you interested in learning more? Chances are it's the shorter subject lines that grab you, right?
It's actually been proven that subject lines with 41 characters or under get higher opening and click-through rates than longer ones. So keep it short and sweet. You don't need to explain in detail what the e-mail is about in the subject line; you just need to give enough information to make people want to open the e-mail to read more. E-mails alerting recipients to a regular subscription product or downloadable information can be longer--test and see what works.
Make sure you put your benefit, offer or most important element in the first few words of the subject line, too. That way, if someone's e-mail program cuts off the end of the subject line (which is pretty common) you'll still get your main point across.
Tip #3:Keep the formatting simple and understated
If you sent an e-mail to a friend, would you type your subject line like this?
"Free Beer And Pizza -- You're Invited!!"
Or how about like this?
"FREE BEER AND PIZZA -- YOU'RE INVITED!!"
It's pretty unlikely, right? So why would your e-mails to your customers and subscribers have subject lines that were formatted like that?
The more your subject lines look like personal e-mails from friends, family members or business associates, the more likely it is that they'll be opened. The more they look like a hard-sell sales pitch, the less effective they'll be.
So avoid capitalization, exclamation marks and dollar signs, which can increase the chances of having your messages flagged as spam, and will be sure to set off warning bells with your recipients.
Tip #4:Use a compelling angle to get your readers interested
Of course, getting your readers to open your e-mails requires more than personalization and formatting. You'll still need to come up with an interesting angle that grabs your customers' attention and makes them want to open the e-mail.
Here are some ideas for subject lines that we've had success with in the past:
Make an announcement or share news: People want to be the first to find out new things, especially if your site covers a specific industry.
Make your reader curious: Suggest that the reader is missing out on an important offer or piece of information. When you use this technique, make sure you leave something to the imagination. For example: "Paul, are you making this common mistake?"
Create a sense of urgency: Consider creating a sense of urgency in your subject line by limiting time ("Frank, only three days left") or quantity ("Mary, only 250 copies available").
Emphasize benefits: Another powerful approach for your subject line is to state how your readers will benefit from your e-mail. If you can tell them how they're going to save money, save time, make their lives easier, etc., by opening and reading your message, you'll have the most success.
Tip #5:Make sure your subject line relates to the content of the e-mail
Nobody likes to be fooled or tricked, so make sure your subject line is related to your actual message--in fact, it's a legal requirement under the CAN-SPAM Act that the subject line be authentic and not misleading.
If your subject line says "Mary, three ways to save money," you need to make sure you actually are talking about that, and preferably within the first few lines. Otherwise, your visitors will feel cheated, and that will hurt your credibility.
And don't forget about the preview pane. Statistics from MarketingSherpa show that 26.6 percent of consumers read e-mails that way. And 69 percent of people reading e-mail at work do so with the preview pane turned on. You risk losing those readers if you don't follow up your subject line almost immediately in the body of the e-mail.
It's time worth spending to come up with subject lines that will entice people to open your e-mails. Those five or six words are vital to your business because they connect you with your most valuable potential customers. So never stop testing them and trying new ones.
Derek Gehl is Entrepreneur.com'se-business columnistand CEO of theInternet Marketing Center. He's an internationally renowned internet marketing expert whose techniques and strategies for building a successful online business have been implemented by hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. His comprehensive internet marketing guide, The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet, has been an online bestseller for 10 years.
Top Secret: Get Your E-mails Opened
Derek Gehl
Entrepreneur.com
As the economy continues along its unsteady path, many small-business owners have been asking me what they can do to keep their businesses financially healthy over the coming months.
I recommend you start by leveraging the tools you already have, and making sure you're using them as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Take your e-mail marketing, for instance. When you stay in touch with your regular customers and subscribers--and send them valuable information--they'll view you as a credible resource, an expert in your field, and most important, someone who's watching out for their best interests.
And they'll reward you with their loyalty (and continued purchases).
But first you have to get those e-mails opened.
With floods of e-mail arriving every hour, most people are ruthless about deleting anything they even suspect won't interest them. Not only that, they're also just as likely to report unwanted e-mails as spam as they are to delete them. So if you're not writing compelling subject lines that get the e-mails opened, all your hard work is lost.
Here are five tips for writing effective e-mail subject lines that can easily double the open (and click-through) rates on your next e-mail.
Tip #1:Use personalization for added attention
Sending out an e-mail with a personalized subject line is the equivalent of calling someone's name in a crowd: It has that same power to grab his attention.
By now, using the recipient's name in your subject line is pretty standard. But that's only the start. You can take personalization further by adding another personal detail to the subject line, like the city your customers live in.
Start with a subject line that looks like this: "Janet, want to get out of the city this weekend?"
Then make it really compelling by adding personal details: "Janet, want to get out of Tucson this weekend?"
A DoubleClick survey found that the most important factor in generating a response was offering a product the recipients wanted at the time. You can accomplish that by segmenting your market, allowing you to personalize the offers or the information in your e-mails to make them timely and relevant.
That means collecting as much data as possible on each person on your mailing list. Then you can create separate campaigns that will appeal to each segment of your audience (e.g., subscribers; people who have purchased once; and people who have purchased more than once).
If your offer is highly personalized, your subject lines can be, too.
And the great thing is that there are plenty of tools out there that can manage and merge in your data to create targeted e-mail campaigns. (We likeiContact.com.)
Tip #2:Keep your subject lines short
Here's a test: Take a look at the subject lines in your inbox. Are there any that stand out more than others? Any that you read first or get you interested in learning more? Chances are it's the shorter subject lines that grab you, right?
It's actually been proven that subject lines with 41 characters or under get higher opening and click-through rates than longer ones. So keep it short and sweet. You don't need to explain in detail what the e-mail is about in the subject line; you just need to give enough information to make people want to open the e-mail to read more. E-mails alerting recipients to a regular subscription product or downloadable information can be longer--test and see what works.
Make sure you put your benefit, offer or most important element in the first few words of the subject line, too. That way, if someone's e-mail program cuts off the end of the subject line (which is pretty common) you'll still get your main point across.
Tip #3:Keep the formatting simple and understated
If you sent an e-mail to a friend, would you type your subject line like this?
"Free Beer And Pizza -- You're Invited!!"
Or how about like this?
"FREE BEER AND PIZZA -- YOU'RE INVITED!!"
It's pretty unlikely, right? So why would your e-mails to your customers and subscribers have subject lines that were formatted like that?
The more your subject lines look like personal e-mails from friends, family members or business associates, the more likely it is that they'll be opened. The more they look like a hard-sell sales pitch, the less effective they'll be.
So avoid capitalization, exclamation marks and dollar signs, which can increase the chances of having your messages flagged as spam, and will be sure to set off warning bells with your recipients.
Tip #4:Use a compelling angle to get your readers interested
Of course, getting your readers to open your e-mails requires more than personalization and formatting. You'll still need to come up with an interesting angle that grabs your customers' attention and makes them want to open the e-mail.
Here are some ideas for subject lines that we've had success with in the past:
Make an announcement or share news: People want to be the first to find out new things, especially if your site covers a specific industry.
Make your reader curious: Suggest that the reader is missing out on an important offer or piece of information. When you use this technique, make sure you leave something to the imagination. For example: "Paul, are you making this common mistake?"
Create a sense of urgency: Consider creating a sense of urgency in your subject line by limiting time ("Frank, only three days left") or quantity ("Mary, only 250 copies available").
Emphasize benefits: Another powerful approach for your subject line is to state how your readers will benefit from your e-mail. If you can tell them how they're going to save money, save time, make their lives easier, etc., by opening and reading your message, you'll have the most success.
Tip #5:Make sure your subject line relates to the content of the e-mail
Nobody likes to be fooled or tricked, so make sure your subject line is related to your actual message--in fact, it's a legal requirement under the CAN-SPAM Act that the subject line be authentic and not misleading.
If your subject line says "Mary, three ways to save money," you need to make sure you actually are talking about that, and preferably within the first few lines. Otherwise, your visitors will feel cheated, and that will hurt your credibility.
And don't forget about the preview pane. Statistics from MarketingSherpa show that 26.6 percent of consumers read e-mails that way. And 69 percent of people reading e-mail at work do so with the preview pane turned on. You risk losing those readers if you don't follow up your subject line almost immediately in the body of the e-mail.
It's time worth spending to come up with subject lines that will entice people to open your e-mails. Those five or six words are vital to your business because they connect you with your most valuable potential customers. So never stop testing them and trying new ones.
Derek Gehl is Entrepreneur.com'se-business columnistand CEO of theInternet Marketing Center. He's an internationally renowned internet marketing expert whose techniques and strategies for building a successful online business have been implemented by hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. His comprehensive internet marketing guide, The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet, has been an online bestseller for 10 years.
From Business Week - Search Optimization for Small Businesses
BWSmallBiz -- Marketing June 20, 2008, 5:00PM
Search Engine Optimization for Small Businesses
You, too, can figure out how to land atop the search heap
by Eve Tahmincioglu
Jill Caren proves that even a one-person business can get top rankings on Google. Caren runs Marlboro (N.J.)-based Expressions Photo Design, and ilovephotogifts.com, her Web site, regularly lands among the first listings for anyone Googling "unique photo gifts," the keywords she thinks potential customers are using in searches.
It wasn't always that way. Caren's previous Web site, expressionspb.com, used to get buried in search results. Caren didn't know how she could improve her standing—a process called search engine optimization, or SEO for short—and approached the Web designer who built her site. When that proved fruitless, Caren took an SEO class online and started hanging out in online SEO forums. Pretty soon, she says, "I decided to redo my site entirely. Instead of leaving it up to someone else, I did it myself, and I could not be happier with the results."
It took Caren about eight months to understand what needed to be changed and how to do it. She launched her new site in June, 2007, and attributes a 21% increase in her annual sales, to about $80,000, to the relaunch. "In less than three months," she says, "I was on the first page of Google for many of my keywords." Now she doesn't do any advertising and is able to rely solely on search to bring in business. Here's how she does it.
THE TITLE SELLS THE BOOK
Titles are easy to overlook, but they're important to search engines. On your home page, the title should give as much detail as possible about what you sell. Other titles should highlight the items sold on those pages or the content that appears there.
Caren researched the keywords in the titles, general text, and coding on her site using goodkeywords.com (free), and wordtracker.com (about $300 for a year's subscription).
THERE IS SOMETHING IN A DOMAIN NAME
Your URL should specify exactly what you sell. Search engines look for keywords in a domain name that are related to the products or services a user is searching for. By changing her domain name from expressionspb.com to ilovephotogifts.com, Caren tells the search engines right from the start what her company does.
BLOG ALREADY
A search engine wants to see fresh content, and blogging is a great way to provide it. Caren blogs at least three times a week. "Google wants to see you're giving people something," she says. Her blog is on her own Web site (not with a hosted service), so that keywords appearing in the blog help her ranking. If she starts attracting comments, those will also count as updates to her site, further boosting her ranking.
TRUMPET YOUR PRODUCTS, BUT NOT TOO OFTEN
This is yet another place for Caren to include keywords for her wares. But be careful—endlessly repeating keywords is a frowned-upon practice known as "stuffing." It's a good way to make a search engine think you're a spammer.
BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL
Another opportunity to add fresh content—and score with the search engines. Caren includes information about weekly specials here and encourages people to sign up for her newsletter.
A PICTURE IS NOT WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
Search engines cannot see images or videos, so Caren makes sure every image on her site gets some sort of short caption or description. She writes them herself, rather than using manufacturers' descriptions. Search engines notice if an item is described in the same way by hundreds of sites, and tend to weed those out. It's also a good idea to add text about each image in the site's coding.
CHART A COURSE FOR THE BOTS
Search engines use software called bots to search your site. A site map will help them find their way. Caren's map has links to over 30 products and their descriptions. She downloaded free coding for her site map from online shopping cart provider Zen Cart, which let her create a map that complies with Google specifications.
Back to BWSmallBiz June/July 2008 Table of Contents http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/08_66/S0806bwsmallbiz.htm
Eve Tahmincioglu is a contributor to BusinessWeek SmallBiz.
Search Engine Optimization for Small Businesses
You, too, can figure out how to land atop the search heap
by Eve Tahmincioglu
Jill Caren proves that even a one-person business can get top rankings on Google. Caren runs Marlboro (N.J.)-based Expressions Photo Design, and ilovephotogifts.com, her Web site, regularly lands among the first listings for anyone Googling "unique photo gifts," the keywords she thinks potential customers are using in searches.
It wasn't always that way. Caren's previous Web site, expressionspb.com, used to get buried in search results. Caren didn't know how she could improve her standing—a process called search engine optimization, or SEO for short—and approached the Web designer who built her site. When that proved fruitless, Caren took an SEO class online and started hanging out in online SEO forums. Pretty soon, she says, "I decided to redo my site entirely. Instead of leaving it up to someone else, I did it myself, and I could not be happier with the results."
It took Caren about eight months to understand what needed to be changed and how to do it. She launched her new site in June, 2007, and attributes a 21% increase in her annual sales, to about $80,000, to the relaunch. "In less than three months," she says, "I was on the first page of Google for many of my keywords." Now she doesn't do any advertising and is able to rely solely on search to bring in business. Here's how she does it.
THE TITLE SELLS THE BOOK
Titles are easy to overlook, but they're important to search engines. On your home page, the title should give as much detail as possible about what you sell. Other titles should highlight the items sold on those pages or the content that appears there.
Caren researched the keywords in the titles, general text, and coding on her site using goodkeywords.com (free), and wordtracker.com (about $300 for a year's subscription).
THERE IS SOMETHING IN A DOMAIN NAME
Your URL should specify exactly what you sell. Search engines look for keywords in a domain name that are related to the products or services a user is searching for. By changing her domain name from expressionspb.com to ilovephotogifts.com, Caren tells the search engines right from the start what her company does.
BLOG ALREADY
A search engine wants to see fresh content, and blogging is a great way to provide it. Caren blogs at least three times a week. "Google wants to see you're giving people something," she says. Her blog is on her own Web site (not with a hosted service), so that keywords appearing in the blog help her ranking. If she starts attracting comments, those will also count as updates to her site, further boosting her ranking.
TRUMPET YOUR PRODUCTS, BUT NOT TOO OFTEN
This is yet another place for Caren to include keywords for her wares. But be careful—endlessly repeating keywords is a frowned-upon practice known as "stuffing." It's a good way to make a search engine think you're a spammer.
BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL
Another opportunity to add fresh content—and score with the search engines. Caren includes information about weekly specials here and encourages people to sign up for her newsletter.
A PICTURE IS NOT WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
Search engines cannot see images or videos, so Caren makes sure every image on her site gets some sort of short caption or description. She writes them herself, rather than using manufacturers' descriptions. Search engines notice if an item is described in the same way by hundreds of sites, and tend to weed those out. It's also a good idea to add text about each image in the site's coding.
CHART A COURSE FOR THE BOTS
Search engines use software called bots to search your site. A site map will help them find their way. Caren's map has links to over 30 products and their descriptions. She downloaded free coding for her site map from online shopping cart provider Zen Cart, which let her create a map that complies with Google specifications.
Back to BWSmallBiz June/July 2008 Table of Contents http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/08_66/S0806bwsmallbiz.htm
Eve Tahmincioglu is a contributor to BusinessWeek SmallBiz.
email tips - from TheStreet.com
Small Business Tips of the Week
Nine Tips for Email Marketing Design
Entrepreneur.com
06/11/08 - 11:00 AM EDT
Written by Gail Goodman
The good news about email marketing is you don't have to be a design expert to create great-looking campaigns. Most email marketing service providers offer pre-designed templates you can choose from (that are created by professional designers). But even with templates, you still have some design decisions to make: What colors and fonts to use, what size to make the fonts, and how much text you should include, to name a few. Follow these nine tips and you'll create emails that not only look great, but also get great results.
Tip 1: Include your logo in the same location each time.
Build your brand with every marketing email you send. One way to do this is to include your logo in all of your email communications. The best practice is to include it in the same location each time you send out an email. It may be in the header or somewhere else in the email (preferably above the point where a reader would have to scroll down to see it, but don't take up the whole preview screen).
Tip 2: Keep the preview pane in mind.
A recent study by Marketing Sherpa found that 70% of recipients that have the capability to read email through a preview pane do. What this means is your subscribers may only see a portion of your email before deciding to open it and look at it in its entirety. Make sure your logo, as well as some enticing information about the email contents can be seen in the preview pane.
Tip 3: Use color for emphasis
While it might be tempting to use a lot of colors in your email campaigns, resist. When deciding which colors to use, start with your company's colors. All of your emails should represent your visual brand, and a key component of that is using your colors consistently.
Colors outside your brand should be saved for emphasis. Use it to call attention to something that is important in the email -- to make it really stand out to the reader.
One of our designers here at Constant Contact likes to use a cooking metaphor when he talks about using color. He makes the point that just because you have every spice on your rack doesn't mean you use each one. You use a little bit here and there to add a little flavor. It's similar with design; you want to use colors to add flavor.
Tip 4: Limit the number of fonts you use.
A good rule of thumb is to use a max of two fonts in your marketing emails. You may use one for the body and another for the headlines and subtitles. Use standard fonts like Arial, Times New Roman or Verdana for the greatest readability. If you use a less common font that not all the people on your list have, their computer will make a substitution that can change the format of your email.
Tip 5: Make your point clearly and quickly.
When it comes to writing the copy for your email, get to the point quickly. The reality is that most people scan. They don't give you much longer than a second to capture their attention. If it takes much longer than that for them to engage, you may lose them. With every moment, a reader is determining if he or she will keep reading or abandon your email.
In the case of newsletters, your copy will be longer than with a promotional email, but the concept of getting to the point still applies. I've found that most first drafts of articles can be chopped down to as much as half their original word count while still conveying the article's message.
Tip 6: Pick photos that support your message.
Including images in an email campaign can make it more attractive and help you communicate your message. (A picture is worth a thousand words.) But this isn't true of any image. If there is too much going on in your photo or if it's poor quality, it can distract the reader and reflect poorly on your business.
When choosing an image for your campaign, look for something that is simple and easy to focus on and relates directly to your content. You don't want readers to look at an image and question what it has to do with your message. If the image doesn't support your message, it will only take away from what you're trying to communicate.
Tip 7: Don't embed your text in an image.
Many of the programs people use to receive and read email have images turned off by default. To ensure that people with this default setting get your message, include text in your email that is not embedded in an image.
Tip 8: Remember that white space is your friend.
What is white space? It's a resting place for the reader's eyes. Without it, your reader will not know where to look. Make sure that you have plenty of room between headlines, articles and any other content you've included in your email.
Tip 9: Keep it simple.
In design, less is more. Emails that are uncluttered visually and have a clear message get a better response. The goal of your email is to get your readers to take some kind of action. You want them to visit your Web site, buy now, get more information, etc. A well-designed email will get your readers to pay attention and make it easy for them to take the action you desire.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nine Tips for Email Marketing Design
Entrepreneur.com
06/11/08 - 11:00 AM EDT
Written by Gail Goodman
The good news about email marketing is you don't have to be a design expert to create great-looking campaigns. Most email marketing service providers offer pre-designed templates you can choose from (that are created by professional designers). But even with templates, you still have some design decisions to make: What colors and fonts to use, what size to make the fonts, and how much text you should include, to name a few. Follow these nine tips and you'll create emails that not only look great, but also get great results.
Tip 1: Include your logo in the same location each time.
Build your brand with every marketing email you send. One way to do this is to include your logo in all of your email communications. The best practice is to include it in the same location each time you send out an email. It may be in the header or somewhere else in the email (preferably above the point where a reader would have to scroll down to see it, but don't take up the whole preview screen).
Tip 2: Keep the preview pane in mind.
A recent study by Marketing Sherpa found that 70% of recipients that have the capability to read email through a preview pane do. What this means is your subscribers may only see a portion of your email before deciding to open it and look at it in its entirety. Make sure your logo, as well as some enticing information about the email contents can be seen in the preview pane.
Tip 3: Use color for emphasis
While it might be tempting to use a lot of colors in your email campaigns, resist. When deciding which colors to use, start with your company's colors. All of your emails should represent your visual brand, and a key component of that is using your colors consistently.
Colors outside your brand should be saved for emphasis. Use it to call attention to something that is important in the email -- to make it really stand out to the reader.
One of our designers here at Constant Contact likes to use a cooking metaphor when he talks about using color. He makes the point that just because you have every spice on your rack doesn't mean you use each one. You use a little bit here and there to add a little flavor. It's similar with design; you want to use colors to add flavor.
Tip 4: Limit the number of fonts you use.
A good rule of thumb is to use a max of two fonts in your marketing emails. You may use one for the body and another for the headlines and subtitles. Use standard fonts like Arial, Times New Roman or Verdana for the greatest readability. If you use a less common font that not all the people on your list have, their computer will make a substitution that can change the format of your email.
Tip 5: Make your point clearly and quickly.
When it comes to writing the copy for your email, get to the point quickly. The reality is that most people scan. They don't give you much longer than a second to capture their attention. If it takes much longer than that for them to engage, you may lose them. With every moment, a reader is determining if he or she will keep reading or abandon your email.
In the case of newsletters, your copy will be longer than with a promotional email, but the concept of getting to the point still applies. I've found that most first drafts of articles can be chopped down to as much as half their original word count while still conveying the article's message.
Tip 6: Pick photos that support your message.
Including images in an email campaign can make it more attractive and help you communicate your message. (A picture is worth a thousand words.) But this isn't true of any image. If there is too much going on in your photo or if it's poor quality, it can distract the reader and reflect poorly on your business.
When choosing an image for your campaign, look for something that is simple and easy to focus on and relates directly to your content. You don't want readers to look at an image and question what it has to do with your message. If the image doesn't support your message, it will only take away from what you're trying to communicate.
Tip 7: Don't embed your text in an image.
Many of the programs people use to receive and read email have images turned off by default. To ensure that people with this default setting get your message, include text in your email that is not embedded in an image.
Tip 8: Remember that white space is your friend.
What is white space? It's a resting place for the reader's eyes. Without it, your reader will not know where to look. Make sure that you have plenty of room between headlines, articles and any other content you've included in your email.
Tip 9: Keep it simple.
In design, less is more. Emails that are uncluttered visually and have a clear message get a better response. The goal of your email is to get your readers to take some kind of action. You want them to visit your Web site, buy now, get more information, etc. A well-designed email will get your readers to pay attention and make it easy for them to take the action you desire.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Entrepreneur.com - 7 Ways to Make Your Business Stand Out
Small Business Solutions
Seven Ways to Make Your Business Stand Out
Entrepreneur.com
03/03/08 - 09:37 AM ESTWritten by Brad Sugars
Some of the most successful businesses in the world have made their mark by articulating their unique capabilities. FedExFDX put itself on the map by guaranteeing packages would reach their destinations overnight. Domino's PizzaDPZ once promised to deliver hot pizza in 30 minutes or less. Burger KingBKC let you "have it your way."
Businesses also need this kind of unique selling proposition (USP) to stand out from the crowd. It's a way to lure prospective customers in your door and away from competitors. It's also a tool to help you avoid the slippery slope of competing on price alone and thereby eating into the margins you need to earn more than a subsistence wage.
Consider the example of my dentist. His challenge was not just to set himself apart but to sell a service that people associate with pain. He did that by creating an office with an exclusive country club atmosphere, reinventing the dental experience.
The foyer has a $5,000 coffee machine, 18 different teas served in fine bone china from a silver tray and an oven baking sugarless muffins to mask the medicinal smell. Patients are greeted by their "personal care nurse," ushered into treatment rooms with their name and photo on the door, offered a choice of DVDs to watch on an overhead TV with headphones and given a buzzer to press if they experience pain.
Defining Your USP
Think of a USP as your secret sauce -- the special ingredient your business uses to prevent becoming a "me too" company. It's something that's truly unique. It grabs people's attention. It can't be easily copied. And it offers a clear-cut, marketable benefit to your customer.
Some USPs practically jump out at you. The fizzy herbal cold and flu fighter Airborne, for example, declares on the package label that it was invented by a second-grade teacher. That's a claim that no other company can make, and it sends a feel-good message that instantly distinguishes the product from other herbal remedies.
Most USPs are harder to come by. If you're a locksmith, mattress store or corporate training company, what makes you different from anyone else in your space? Here are some suggestions for helping you answer that question.
1. Analyze the competition. What do they do well? Where do they fall short? What don't they offer that you do? Where are they geographically located in comparison to you? Look for holes in the market that will help you define your niche.
2. Determine what sets you apart. Maybe you're the only local jewelry store with a designer on the premises. Or a florist that employs a professional writer to craft customers' messages. Or a pastry school that offers an unusual 24-week certificate program. Or a management consultant whose principals have worked with Fortune 100 companies. If you can make claims like these, you have an easy USP to hang your hat on.
3. If you have no differentiator (and many start-ups don't), invent one. That's what my dentist did. And don't be afraid to change the message as your business evolves. I know of one Web site design firm that started out promoting the fact that it also provides Internet marketing services like search engine optimization. Over time, it carved out a position as an expert in Web content management and adapted its USP accordingly.
4. Identify consumer pain points. When all else fails, list the main frustrations of consumers in your industry and devise a USP to blunt them. If you're a carpet cleaner, for example, you might offer an emergency service or a do-it-yourself fabric care kit to address the fear of stains between visits and build your message around those services.
5. Offer a guarantee. Again, focus on offering a cure for common customer frustrations. I once helped a plumbing contractor write a guarantee promising that plumbers would turn up within 15 minutes of the scheduled time or provide the first hour of work free, leave the house cleaner than when they arrived and show up in uniforms with belts. The goal: Conquer plumbers' reputation for lateness, messiness and embarrassing rear views.
6. Be specific and concrete. Baskin-Robbins once touted its 31 flavors, even incorporating "31" into its logo. Wonder Bread used to "help build strong bones 12 ways." You might be a heating company that's on call 24 hours a day, a manufacturer that offers 142 different widgets or a gym with 56 machines. If you've got it, flaunt it.
7. Never make a claim you can't fulfill. The plumbing contractor I just mentioned established a series of systems to make good on its guarantee, including equipping employees with handheld vacuums, booties and belted uniforms. Be sure you can deliver what you promise or your USP will be useless.
Once you've established your USP, your job is to condense it into a few words and then communicate it at every touchpoint -- from your Yellow Pages ads, letterhead and marketing collateral to your Web site, signage, sales calls and beyond.
Think of it this way: What makes you choose one clothing store, builder or moving company over another? Chances are it's their success in defining their USP and broadcasting that message to the marketplace. Take a page from their book. You'll get noticed -- and the cash flowing -- a lot faster.
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