5 Rules of Social Media for Your Business

The most common things I hear about people who are trying to figure out social media (blogging, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube) are: “I don’t get it.” and “Do I have to?”. These are the sounds of change, of lasting change, of change that isn’t just a passing fad. The most effective way to understand this change, however, is not stare at the social media tools themselves – they’re just the tools – they aren’t what’s driving it, and they’re not what it means. Understand first, then go back to the tools, and you’ll see them making sense. Here are the five rules:

1. Marketing your business now is about what you contribute, not what you’re selling. Yeah, I know that sounds like hokum, but that’s because this is change. Before, marketing was an elite activity. The mysterious priests of marketing dispensed the wisdom of what works, demographic charts in hand. And it did work – it usually worked better than just randomly trying things. But watch now as those same marketing gurus try to make corporate blogs work, and you’ll see they too are trying to grasp a change that they themselves are not driving. Marketing your business now is about what you contribute. In other words, don’t say “I offer this product or service. If you want this, pick me.” That lowest common denominator panhandling never really was marketing, but it’s less so now than ever, and it’s downright offensive in social media environments. Want to ruin your brand, pitch underhanded. Watching people try to grasp this change is interesting – it’s requiring more people to take their work more seriously. What is a contribution after all? It’s insight, expertise, opinion, advice, education, analysis, explanation – but it’s not thinly veiled sales pitches – let me explain 3 benefits of picking us. The best marketing in social media never mentions ‘us’ or ‘me’. It talks about the world around us – it looks with the community out at something, instead of trying to funnel the community down a chute like cows to slaughter. The quickest route to failure is having nothing that interests you and nothing to say. This is, of course, daunting for those who chose their profession solely to pay bills rather than for the love. But even that can be an angle – one way to capture people’s interest is to talk about the boat a lot of people are in, to express that dissatisfaction and angst. It may not be your way, but it’s one way.

2. Being genuinely gregarious and amiable is attractive where trolling for clients is offensive. I say this as someone who in some ways is more of a brown moth than a social butterfly. I’m not the guy with 3000 contacts, who is the center of parties. Those guys are social anchors, and they truly have it made. I am connected with a few dozen social anchors, though, each with their own community. And I’m connected with lots of other people who dig what I’m putting out. Effectiveness, for me, comes from including people, inviting people to connect, and generally making that small effort that brings people into my orbit, without ulterior motives. In a way, you have to like being connected to people. And again, I’m not selling them anything or pushing product down their throats. I like certain movies, and share them. I like certain wines, and share them. And when I say something related to internet marketing, as I do frequently, people know it’s free information and it’s coming from a certain degree of experience. I share that experience consistently, and so people refer me and consult me, and I get some benefit from being considered by some a resident expert. If I were a landscaper, I wouldn’t say “call us if you need your lawn mowed”, I’d say “To protect your lawn in this heat, prefer one long watering per day over two short ones, for maximum ground penetration”. or “Fall is coming – time to start thinking about what trees you’ll plant – but resist the tree sales at your big box store – it’s really too soon.”

3. Your reputation is already public – you either add your voice or concede it to others. One question is what if someone says something negative about the company? It happens. You’re not a serious enterprise unless someone doesn’t like you. If one disgruntled client (or ex employee disguised as a client) makes you want to hide in a hole, then obscurity is in your future. It’s rough, but getting past five stars to 4.5 is worth the journey, because that’s when your orbit is pulling in enough people to sustain you.

4. You will adapt to the new social media, or your business will die or begin to die in the next few years. It’s not a passing fad. Some businesses can still grow by handing out flyers, or with a phone book ad, for a while. And traditional marketing isn’t dying – it’s evolving. Event marketing, for example, is more powerful than ever. But effective event marketing requires effective use of social media. After all, how are you getting out the word about your event, and to whom? If you have a big announcement, and haven’t already cultivated an audience that respects you, attendance will be limited. Even if you hand out flyers or placing a paper ad, isn’t your web site or facebook page at the bottom? If not, you’re missing takers. But as media is transformed, clinging to the old way, if coupled with failing to grasp the new way, is a sure recipe for decline. Adapting will mean revising an evolving internet marketing plan that places a strong emphasis on social media tools, but will be effective only with a social media mentality.

5. Those who adapt their assumptions will find social media a windfall. That’s true whenever this kind of cultural change occurs. In this case, adapting assumptions means neither trying to ignore social media, nor trying to treat social media as the old kind of marketing. The list of things that are so basic that they aren’t changing is getting smaller. People don’t respond anymore to “agreement by a panel of experts” – or they respond by asking their friends and checking ratings. The customer process is social. The business process is social. Change sometimes causes people to get scared, and scared people act in a variety of ways – some shut down, some pretend the wave isn’t coming – cling to what you’re doing and hope, and there are lots of other ways. But here is the last rule: you can learn to use social media effectively. You can adapt. You can “get it”. It may be that, when you do, you won’t like what it means. “Do I have to?” The new marketing requires actually working at it, not just throwing money at it. Most people don’t want to do new things. Social media is asking you to do different things. If you don’t want to be the person in your company that thinks about and connects with community, then the different thing is identifying and empowering the person that’s passionate about it. Before, you called an agency and tossed them some cash, and you were done. They’ll still take your cash, but those days really are over. That said, if you need help learning how to use social media effectively, we’re happy to help.

Kick Ass Web Site Marketing

Kick Ass Web Site Marketing: A Guide To Do It Yourself Success

by Daniel DiGriz

Ever want to take your web site into your own hands?

• Build a New Site or Niche Site
• Overhaul an Existing Site
• Do your own Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Organize your own Navigation for maximum marketing effect
• Do your own Content creation that turns visitors into contacts
• Localize your site for target service areas

This book will is a crash course in what to do and what not to do. Your web site platform provider already delivers you help files and manuals on how to edit your web pages and work on your web site (no need for another book on that), but what about doing it effectively for search engines and marketing? We’ve taken years of experience and expertise and distilled them into a manual for making your site a marketing monster. If you’ve got that Do-It-Yourself vibe, you want the Kick Ass Web Site Marketing Guide.

[Purchase information coming soon]

Generating Endless Blog Posts

Generating Endless Blog Posts

by Daniel DiGriz

Do you have a blog or a business site that needs one, but don’t know what to write about?

• Got writers block, and you didn’t even sign up to be a writer?
• Stumped on what to do next and tempted to copy material? (don’t!)
• Need to breathe life, excitement, and interest that grabs attention into a blog?
• Want to use your blog to engage in social media, but everything you write sounds like a sales pitch?

This is the book for you. With more than 122 different blog ideas, you’ll have enough to write a post every three days (for maximum search engine optimization), and then recycle the technique with different content the next year, and the next, and so on. This book provides you a methodology for never running out of fascinating blog posts that anyone can write easily.

[Purchase information coming soon]

Market Differentiators: product = service

Here’s a new tip on market differentiators.

First, we’ve explained this before, but let’s review what a market differentiator is. It’s some specific action you take that sets you apart from the competition. Don’t imagine “corporate-like sales talk here”. We don’t mean you’re reliable, honest, fair, fast, affordable, or any number of other adjectives. Everyone says those things. Have you ever met a competitor who tells clients he’s unreliable, dishonest, unfair, slow, expensive, etc? All the adjectives are not differentiators. They make you sound like everyone else. They’re same-inators.  Sounding like someone else who marketed like that is some people’s idea of marketing, which is why we can all pop off with those things in our sleep – we’ve heard them a million times. Everyone says them. And no one’s listening anymore. Back when marketing was born, you just didn’t have to work that hard at it. If you said “I’m reliable” people went “wow, ok then”. But after everyone started saying it, from your insurance agent to your landscaper, it became marketing-ese, not marketing.  Market differentiators are verbs. They’re the things you *do* (verb, action, activity) that are tangibly different. If you say “we deliver reliable reports” (gong! thanks for playing anyway – you just sneaked in another adjective). No, you need to actually do something differently in a sea of sameness. If you aren’t doing anything differently, that’s your very first marketing task.

OK, now the tip. Service = Product, Product = Service. When you’re creating market differentiators (remember, these are verbs), turn a service into a product, and a product into a service:

• If you offer a service like report writing, or contract selling, or brokering a deal, bend it a little toward being a product, a tangible, a deliverable. You might include extra visual aids, you might offer a free course with your service, or you might deliver backup documents on a thumb drive, or offer free backups of related documentation for a period of time (that’s adding an additional unusual service to a normal service – that’s great, too). These are just some examples. The idea is to add value.
• If you offer a product like cosmetics, classic automobile body parts, or used books, include a service-oriented extra action or activity when people buy your products. Examples: ship free if you pay with direct bank draft instead of credit card (you save money and pass it on to your clients, and you set yourself apart). We won’t spend a lot of time here talking about monetary perks – there are lots of ways to do those, and that’s what consulting’s for (call us for an appointment). Something different: when you buy parts from us, we pre-etch them, before we ship, with the number of your choice, in case your ride is ever stolen. You see what we’re aiming at. Do things differently. Add value that the other guys won’t.

One more example – this is adding a product to a product, which is also nice: The local coffee shop I go to makes blueberry pie. So do a lot of people. So what? These guys make home-made blueberry pie. There’s an adjective for you – “home-made”. Again, so what? When Olive Garden can toss out that word “home-made” it doesn’t mean much anymore. Here’s what they do differently. Most “home-made” pies use a shortcut like canned pie filling or a pre-made crust. The pie filling is especially common. These guys don’t do it that way. They put fresh blueberries in a pressure cooker and they make the pie filling. Then they make the pie out of the pie filling. That’s a tangible, verb-based, “we *do* this differently” difference. It’s a market differentiator. Actually, for them it’s not, because they don’t tell anyone this. If they put it on their web site, NOW it’s a market differentiator. You get the drift.

Anyway, product=service, service=product…. or add a service to a service, add a product to a product. It’s a great way to think of adding value – by actually adding something. That’s it. That’s a tip that works for us, and we think it can work in your marketing.

More free advice from Market Moose internet marketing. We think about this stuff all the time, because someone needs to.

You Mean You’re Not in My Home Town?

Does it matter?

One of the surprised comments we always get is “Oh, I thought you were right here in Akron… or Saginaw… or Minneapolis.” No, why? Does it matter? One of the reasons we’re effective is that we’re an internet-based business helping people do internet marketing. We’re not replacing your roof or fixing hail damage, so being local just isn’t part of the equation for us.

Where do we work?

Anywhere we want. That’s not to be arrogant, but part of the reason I got into this business was the ability to be in Portland, Chicago, Manhattan, Korea, or India, working from a beach, a plane, or a mountain top, and deliver effective solutions to people anywhere. I don’t want my experience limited to what has been tried in only one locale, or my perspective undermined by a less than global understanding of a global infrastructure – like the world wide web. Since we can work with any market, we bring global experience to your market.

Are we going to dinner, or rocking your marketing?

We conduct our consultations by phone, our followups by e-mail, and our hands-on work on the same internet that feeds any location from Tuscon to Timbuktu (yep, [same internet]. When you get down to it, you don’t want an internet marketing professional that conducts business by bike messenger, door-knocking, or paper airplane. If we’re not on the web, your success won’t be, either.

We support local business.

For us, the way we support local businesses is not primarily by buying services. An internet marketing company is fairly self-contained. We just don’t need that much, because our resources are ‘in the cloud’, so to speak – they’re on the internet itself. The internet *is* our brick and mortar. We support local business by helping those local businesses that select us succeed within their specific markets. If you’re in Shreveport, Louisiana, then our aim is to bring you clients in Shreveport and any surrounding areas you cover. If you serve the entire Eastern seaboard, then our aim is support *your* business in that market. Instead of struggling to reach people on the net, we start on the net. You be local, but let us be everywhere, because that’s how we can serve you best.

Market Moose internet marketing. The local choice, regardless of where you are.

Core Navigation – What Belongs and What Doesn’t

The core content on a web site (the information needed to make a buying decision – any information integral to the sales process) belongs in the web site’s core navigation (the links in the top or top side portion of the web site). The original business web sites that started kicking up in about 1994 had the following five core content pages, usually:

• Home
• About (us)
• Services or Products
• F.A.Q. (frequently asked questions)
• Contact (us) or Order Form

These were, after all, the pieces needed to make a sale. You looked at the HOME page for the core marketing message and marketing differentiators. You looked at the ABOUT page to decide if you trust the company or want to know more about who you’re doing business with, before you give them your business. You looked at the SERVICES or PRODUCTS page to make sure you were getting the right product or service, to narrow down choices, or see if there might be a package deal or additional incentive. You might glance at the F.A.Q. if you were hesitant to contact the service provider or order the product, to see if your concern or objection is answered there. And finally you used the CONTACT or ORDER link to go forward with the service or product. The marketing piece (web site) was driven by the sales process.

As other content pages were added, they were generally moved to secondary navigation. For instance, you might add a photo GALLERY. It’s not really crucial information to help you make a buying decision. It’s fluff – maybe beautiful fluff – maybe even effective fluff – you might get a lot of contacts that mention it – but you still, usually, don’t put it in primary navigation.

By primary navigation, we usually mean the first top horizontal row of links or buttons – buttons are kind of old fashioned these days – like knobs on a car stereo – and they have lower search engine optimization (SEO) value than plain links. By secondary navigation, we usually mean either the left sidebar (occasionally a right sidebar) or the second row of horizontal links. Some sites have a third row or additional column (tertiary navigation). Some have dropdowns (hierarchical navigation – pages and subpages, categories and subcategories). Some have other forms of navigation altogether, for highly specialized sites. Wikipedia, for example, is primarily search-based navigation – something that’s less effective for a service-based business site, but which works fairly well for a product-based site like Amazon. In all, though, most navigation schemas follow something like what you’d find in a book – whether it’s using a table of contents, an index, tabs, markers, or what have you. The rectangular screen, book-like approach is actually a tried and true way of ordering navigation and content that’s been the standard since we stopped using scrolls.

As time went on in the web world, though – as we moved from thousands of sites to hundreds of thousands – some pages became more common in primary navigation, and some pages less so. This happened slowly, because people tended to copy one another’s standards. When there were very few business web sites, business sites had certain things, so people assumed that all business web sites should have them. Some of those decisions made less sense as the web developed. The best example is the LINKS page. You still see one on some sites. For more personal brands, or social startups, that can make sense. For the average real estate agent though, for example, it usually doesn’t. First, those links pages became popular before search engines like Google. Why do I need you to tell me how to find the local school district, when Google can do it instantly? Businesses wanted to be your one stop shop – your portal for all web-based information – so these pages often grew out of control.

But quickly, there came to be much better portals out there, both in terms of richness of content and in being maintained and remaining current and comprehensive. If you want a portal of say community links in Albuquerque, NM, constantly adding to – let alone maintaining all those links as they change (so they don’t get broken and you look unprofessional) – can be a hassle. Besides, precisely since the spurt of search engines like Google, you actually lose SEO value for having a lot of external links on your site. You’re giving away your search engine “juice” – your search engine value. When search engines see a site that has a ton of external links, they rank it lower, not higher – worse, it can get treated as a portal site  – a site that’s chief value is links to other sites – something the search engine itself already provides – and ranked very low. LINKS pages are a vestige of the past, when there were fewer indexes, guides, portals, and less effective search engines, not to mention social bookmarking sites that, for a lot of internet uses, make even those things superfluous. If you see a Links page on another business site, don’t rush out to copy them. Unless it’s highly unique, just chuckle and don’t try to ‘compete’ with that.

A new link (or button) that has popped up in primary navigation in a lot of effective business web sites is (our) BLOG. That’s because, as we’ve said elsewhere, dynamic (constantly growing) content can have much higher search engine value than static content, if you do it right. That’s true precisely because the fascination of reading a web site just because it exists wore off long ago, when we passed the threshold of business sites being uncommon and interesting to sites being ubiquitous and largely boring. In a world of gazillions of web sites, we want fresh, original, frequently updated content. It’s like when balsam shampoo came out. People rushed to buy it – there were only a handful of shampoos at the local grocer then – remember Prell?, and this balsam stuff was all new. But now there’s an entire aisle dedicated to shampoo, and frankly no one cares if it has balsam or henna or whatever. Instead, you’ve really got to be part of the ongoing popular dialogue – natural, organic, phosphate free… No one had heard of a blog in 1994. To this day, some small businesses are unaware of the marketing value – they’re not part of the cultural shift – the new ongoing discussion among their target clientelle, which itself is shifting underneath them. It doesn’t matter if your 20 clients over 50 tell you they don’t use Facebook – your 2000 prospects that are using Facebook are going to be that next wave of clients, unless you ignore them – that’s how attrition will kill a business that doesn’t adapt.

Or businesses copy dynamic content, but badly – sometimes literally, plagiarizing blogs right off the web – which actually hurts their SEO – it’s like feeding yourself poison. It’s as if you could tape record a conversation with your client and just put a cassette deck in the lobby with that dialogue on a loop. How effective is that? Not without barbed wire and sodium penethol. Internet marketing stopped being just a collection of gimmicks when having a web site stopped being just a gimmick. The new internet marketing is all about being genuine and open (remember that friend or relative that wouldn’t “go online” because a virus might leap off of the internet and destroy his computer?) and about communicating – not just speaking “at” them. If you’ve got armloads of expertise, insights, and advice, and you can listen to what your clients and prospects are struggling with, don’t fully understand, or want to think about – then you’ve got the makings of internet marketing success. You have the core – all you need is the technique, and a little consulting time with a group like ours can get you the rest of the way.

There are certain things you need in your core navigation (primary or secondary), and they haven’t changed all that much. You still need the basics we bulleted up above. For instance, your About (us) page and Contact (us) page should generally be prominent. For examples, see [these sites] or [these].

There are times, however, when you break the rules. Generally, hiding the CONTACT page is like hiding a lamp under a bushel. If you want to maximize people’s ability to interact with you, you make it easy to see and click from the top of the site (core navigation),  you have links to follow you or add you to social networks (like Facebook and Twitter), and you have a lead capture form on nearly every page. Commonly, sites that don’t do this are sites that sell products, but don’t want to field a lot of customer service calls – they want to funnel you to online or automated help solutions or a support ticket system, but aren’t wanting to consult with you personally about a service they’re offering. Amazon is, again, an example. But a real estate agent who buries the Contact page is likely to chase away clients who want to be represented by an agent. Same with attorneys, psychologists, personal trainers, accountants, or anyone else who provides a service or acts as agent or advocate for you.

Likewise, the ABOUT (us) page: Companies that put it at the bottom of the site, or bury or hide it, are usually either so well known that only researchers are looking for the info (like Walmart) or so transactional that the most important thing is to get a line of products visible for purchase online with a price, a search feature, and a buy now button (like Amazon). For Amazon, again, primary navigation is about searching for products, not about getting information. A company that’s a new startup or is trying to greatly increase their contacts and interest from internet marketing, needs a prominent ABOUT page. They can always move it to the footer when they’re a household word. But even product-based sites often need a prominent ABOUT page if they’re unknown and need to garner trust for the sale. Remember, core navigation is about providing any information needed to complete the sales process. When I’m about to buy my favorite Red Bush Tea from a web site I’ve never seen before, I read the ABOUT page before deciding to order.

Footer navigation (as opposed to core navigation) became essential as legal concerns and misunderstandings (and even abuse of the web) abounded. In the footer, it’s common to find a general “legal statement” or “terms of service” (TOS) or more specific Privacy Statement, Copyright Statement, Credits (e.g. “Powered by Market Moose”), or an alternate Contact option (e.g. Webmaster’s e-mail address or “Report Site Problems”). Today, you might see something like “Open Trouble Ticket” or “Support” (though having a more prominent Support link – e.g. in core navigation – can help the sale by emphasizing that support is only a click away). There’s not one right answer – for example, another theory suggests making the support link less prominent, to avoid suggesting that it’s a common need. But companies often find themselves shifting from one marketing approach to another (e.g. as clients complain about not finding the support link). There’s a doctrine of navigation, but it’s not a collection of absolutes. As we said, you will sometimes find the About (us) and/or Contact (us) links in the footer, if the company is a household word, is primarily product and online ordering driven, or wishes to avoid personalized contacts and consultations.

A Site Map is another excellent piece (with high SEO value) to find in the footer. It’s a good marketing help, too, so it’s nearly impossible for a determined site visitor to get lost. All navigation should be recapitulated in the site map. In some sites, membership or an account is required to view certain pages, so you might want the site map visible only for those who are logged in.

One secret is that if you have a flash-based web site, your core navigation buttons are likely invisible to some search engines or, if you’re using graphic buttons, they have much lower SEO value than text links, so a common search engine optimization technique is to recapitulate the entire navigation scheme as text links in the footer. It can look a bit cluttered, but that’s a trade off – in addition to the heightened SEO value, it’s actually excellent if the site visitor has a broken flash installation, is using a currently non-flash device like an Apple Ipad, or just has a weird-sized device that might cut off or otherwise interfere with your core navigation. It’s more insurance against a determined (to buy or contact you) visitor getting lost.

Remember, not everyone is like we are – some need a brief summary of all the core elements on the home page (who, what, where, why, what now?) and will make up their mind about you right then; others need more detailed information to support them in the sales process, and will utilize more secondary pages. The most effective sites have universal appeal not because they satisfy one presumably shared personality, but because they cater to the breadth of different buyer types out there. The biggest mistake with navigation is to assume that buyers only need what I need. Once we assume that, we’ve stopped listening to what the effective conventions really are – they’re aggregate feedback from gazillions of buyers on how they actually think, what they really want, and what they need to make a buying or a contact decision. Approach your navigation as if most of the world is not like you (a conceit we can all fall into, to the detriment of our marketing). Instead, make your navigation appeal to all kinds of people by being well-ordered and easy to use (even if it seems clear and simple enough) and thorough (even if you really think most people won’t click on most links, because you wouldn’t). Guard always, in internet marketing, against seeing yourself as the client base. If you go by the common 4-square personality charts, you’re only 25%  – you’re the minority. Most of your site visitors don’t think like you, decide like you, or buy like you. Get them all – make your navigation personality-proof.

Navigation is a core marketing feature of your web site and is directly linked, therefore, to both the sales process and to search engine optimization. Intuitive navigation – focused on usability, visitor expectations, and business conventions – is a key component of the web site as a marketing venue. If your navigation is cluttered, highly unusual (without a highly unusual purpose), or ill-conceived, overhauling the navigation is just as important as any other SEO or marketing task on your web site, and should be a significant part of any web site build or web site overhaul package. You wouldn’t outfit a NASCAR vehicle with confusing or cryptic controls – it needs to be something a driver can settle into and navigate easily and ‘instinctively’. The demand for rationally ordered navigation, with a reduced learning curve, is actually increasing as technology devices become simpler to learn and use – e.g. the Apple Ipad – and as standardized devices (whether hardware like smart phones or software like instant messengers and e-mail) reach near total saturation of the market. Pay attention to your core navigation – of course, we’re here to help also.

Market Moose Internet Marketing – Solving Problems As Technology Changes.

Site Navigation Theory Made Simple

Web site navigation can make or break the best web site, the best content, and the best intentions. At first glance, the single most obvious sign of a web site that has not had a professional treatment is the navigation. There are a number of basic things that navigation theory can lend to your site build that will help make it a winner.

Keep it Few: Generally speaking, on a business site, if you’ve got more than half a dozen horizontal (top) buttons or links (your primary navigation), and more than half a dozen vertical (side) buttons or links (your secondary navigation), you’re losing people through clutter frustration. You’re actually adding challenges to locate information. There’s some give and take, and there are lots of successful sites that ignore this rule, but they’re also doing it on purpose for highly specialized reasons.

Use Hierarchical Navigation: If you need more than half a dozen buttons each for primary and secondary navigation, it’s time to nest them with parent and child pages. This is a sign of well organized content, and it invites your visitors to think in a more marketing oriented manner.

Navigation equals Marketing: Your main navigation should have the same helpful things that a home page would on a static site: who you are, what you do, where you do it, why choose you, what to do next. Translate that into buttons and you get the classic navigation schema: ABOUT US, SERVICES, COVERAGE AREA, OUR DIFFERENCE, CONTACT US (or BUY NOW).

Use Posts vs. Pages: Lots of pages of original content can increase SEO (search engine optimization). But don’t overestimate static pages. Dynamic sites beat static sites most of the time, so a single BLOG page frequently updated with fresh, original, relevant posts is the best use of one button there is. Better yet, if you want maximum SEO burn, make the blog your HOME page. Also, a blog page has it’s own forms of tertiary navigation – tags, categories, etc. You don’t need button overload when you blog. If you’re about to create a new page, ask  yourself why it can’t be a post instead?

Blur the Boundaries: One of the techniques we use a lot is to use posts instead of pages, but keep the posts in categories – for instance, instead of using an FAQ page, we use an FAQ category and just add posts. That affords us some nifty additional features that static pages often don’t have.

Keep Names Simple: Don’t name a button or navigation link “General Information About Our Company”. Name it ABOUT or GENERAL or INFO. Or, if you need to look expansive, ABOUT US. Whether you choose CONTACT US or CONTACT is not a preference worth agonizing over. But a button called “Contact Us Any Time 24/7 By E-mail or Phone” is silly.

Keep in mind that about 25% of your audience will not make a decision to contact you without being able to research and find all of the information, in a well-organized manner on your site, that they need to make a decision. For them, navigation has got to be effectively organized into some sort of rational structure. Another 25% of visitors won’t contact you without being able to quickly access the straightforward, bottom line options they need to decide. For them, navigation has got to be simple, obvious, and meet some standard expectations.

Follow these general guidelines from web site navigation theory, and your small business web site will likely be more effective at converting more hits into actual contacts.

Market Moose helps small businesses build effective web sites, search engine optimization, and internet marketing.

How are Your Fees So Reasonable?

We bundle! We could charge more, nickel and dime-ing clients for services that really need to go together, because they affect one another directly and overlap – like someone might sell you a water pump, only to tell you later that you also need a new bracket . By bundling, though, Market Moose gets greater client loyalty, offers packages at more reasonable fees, and remains highly efficient – which brings costs down.

We keep overhead low! We’re a company that acts like a sole proprietorship. Market Moose doesn’t unnecessarily add titles and positions or insulate ourselves from the client. Daniel DiGriz, company president, gets on the phone himself, is arms deep in web building and search engine optimization, and does a lot more. Everything that can stay in-house, stays in-house. Lower costs means we don’t have to hit you with huge fees to be successful.

We work by appointment! Have you ever played phone tag – left messages – the other person is on the phone – they call you back – you’ve taken another call? We don’t chase clients around the Ma Bell network, or in between the cell towers, and they don’t have to chase us. Most of what we need to do for web sites and search engine optimization can be handled by e-mail but, for paid marketing consultations or the initial free consultation to start a project, we do what doctors and attorneys do. This respects everyone’s time, allows us to keep our other appointments, lets us take more clients at lower cost, and ensures you’re not wondering where we are and vice versa.

We stay off the phone! Any given phone call uses at least 400% more time than an e-mail. Multiply that times the number of prospects and clients, and we’d have to hire four extra people just for phones (driving up prices). Ask yourself if the phone call for something that could be handled by e-mail is worth passing that cost back to you. What we do instead, is provide the initial phone consultation free, then work by e-mail. Action items, status updates, and calendar items make e-mail incredibly effective for web-based work. For clients that prefer to work exclusively by phone, Market Moose offers that as a premium service for an additional fee. And of course, consulting is our core service, so we’re able to reserve appointment time for that, by using the phone only when it’s absolutely necessary.

We’re not the cheapest! All this said, there are people who will shave a few dollars off the price, and there are clients who’ll think it’s all interchangeable and will bargain shop. That’s not our client base. We’re not trying to be the cheapest. One of the reasons our value is so high is that we’re not really selling a list of services, even though we offer packages in that form. It’s not a sprinkle of SEO, a touch of design, a nod to marketing… We think about how it all interacts, and we offer expanded services, like consulting, to help clients develop a successful internet marketing plan that lasts. We aren’t really trying to compete on price – we compete on value. That said, due to the above efficiencies, our fees seems to be about half of what most people charge for what we’re delivering – which is freaking awesome!

Where is Everyone? Try Facebook!

Ask yourself, “where is everyone these days?” When I was a kid, groups and social networking was extremely popular. It’s not something invented in 2004, despite the constant regurgitation of old articles and news vignettes about how networking is helping job seekers and career folks to get opportunities and small businesses to grow. We used to meet at everything from the Rotary Club to Toastmasters. And not to knock those cultural institutions – they’re still  popular, and I’m sure they’re still effective. We’ve even seen reported growth at such gatherings, and new groups forming, in the wake of the current economic situation. But it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the growth of social media, often for the exact same purposes.

“Pssst! There over here, in Facebook!” I’m  betting there are more conversations happening in Facebook every hour, on the average, than in all of those in-person social networks put together in an entire day. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Craigslist, MySpace… that’s where the people are. They’re in social media.

Some would decry this and say it’s depersonalizing everything, and undermining the growth of local cultures Sure, maybe some. Those are reasonable points. But it’s also doing things that weren’t happening before, and which occasional national conventions didn’t solve. It’s letting people in outlying towns, neighboring states, or half way across the globe connect, interact, and yes even exchange referrals and do business. And there are plent of local and regional groups, pages, and entities in social media. Social media is also rich. It maybe isn’t the same as a handshake, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily less substantive. The plethora of new kinds of exchanges in social media – from sending someone a virtual beer or flowers, to starting an instant poll on something you said, to tagging one of your photos with commentary and sharing it with one’s own audience (people you had no access to before), social media is like handshaking on steroids. It’s the grip that keeps on giving.

It can water down some kinds of relationships - some business owners find that people coming in off of Facebook, Twitter, or Craigslist can be more savvy and informed, more immune to persuasion, more price and comparison driven, more exposed to a variety of competitors, and often they have a bottom line they’re aiming at that’s already well defined. We get the same kind of traffic at times here at Market Moose. Someone who e-mails “quote me a price” without even a clear idea of what they’re pricing – “for what, exactly?” Often when we suggest an initial consultation to understand their needs, they just move on. Good riddance. Seriously, it’s not Burger King vs. McDonalds. If that’s what you want, go someplace with a virtual drive through – they are plentiful – it’s just not our niche, and not every client is our client. But we do get just as many people who appreciate the difference of a custom fitting over suits off the rack. And if you use social media to inform, advise, offer insight into that difference – if you can make a convincing case, without pitching everyone, without sounding like an ad, for a different kind of service, then you can really see your business grow from social media.

If all you’re offering is, “Hey, I’m in Facebook too. Buy my stuff.” you’re going to get a steady stream of “Why should I pay you more than the next guy’s bottom dollar?” I mean seriously, do you look left and see gas at $2.49, look right and see the same gas at $2.09 and think “same difference”? You’ve either got to *be* different, and communicate the importance of difference, or you’ve got to run out to the sign and slap a zero over the four, and then it’s just you and them and a price war. It’s like the housing market is right now – you’ve got to throw in a flat screen TV to bribe the buyer, because listings are everywhere and, often, it’s all being presented as just square footage – it’s a commodities market.  Your services are going to be a commodities market, too, if you don’t set yourself apart. We’ve written before about “marketing differentiators“, so we won’t go into it again here.

But once you’ve decided on your niche, your market, and made yourself unique, it’s time to make yourself the obvious choice, and that means getting into social media and creating a culture and a following around your ideas, your difference, your independence from the commodities pricing that’ll kill your competition, while your difference insures your survival and growth. Do participate in in-person social networks, if you’re a locally based business (that’s *participate* not show up and hand out business cards). But if you really want to reach numbers, use social media effectively, and you can often connect with a bigger set of prospects in an hour than in a month of hand-shaking. Again, not knocking the Rotary Club, but some of them get this fact and are adapting for precisely these reasons. If you’re in Facebook, for instance, check out the Rotary Club of Santa Paula, California.

Does Your Web Site Bring (and Keep) Clients?

In the old days, you’d throw up a web site because, “that’s what you do, if you have a business – you have to be online”. It’s like buying stationary used to be, or picking out china patterns. The function may be long gone (do you still use a typewriter?) but the ritual remains. And yet, some things evolve a new purpose. With web sites, for example, it used to be enough that you were there at all – that you were “on the internet”. Now, you don’t need a web site just to exist on the web – there are plenty of free phone directories for that – if all you needs is for people who know your name to look up your number.

The real purpose of a web site for small business should be to grow your business. If not, isn’t there something wrong with that? And growing your business is not just about “bringing in new clients” by itself. Sure, that’s important, but that by itself is more suitable for a drive thrrough hamburger stand. Growing your business is about a couple of things:

1. Keeping existing clients in your orbit - providing them ways to interact with you, be informed by you, receive insight, advice, and useful content from you. Share your content, bring you referrals, interact with others regarding your content, etc.

2. Bringing in new clients – An easily locate-able (search engine optimized and frequently updated) resource that assists prospects in making business decisions (marketing, information, navigation, resources, lead capture and conversion, etc.) – to become your clients, where appropriate – and then stay in your orbit (see #1).

If your web site isn’t bringing in clients and, almost more importantly, retaining your clients. Or if you’re getting lots of hits and few contacts (useless hits – no targeted audience), you need an overhaul. And again, perhaps more importantly, you need a little time with an internet marketing consultant to make a plan for growing your business, with your web site as one of the tools (these days, it certainly isn’t the only tool you should have in your tool belt – but if the web site is not right, a lot of the other tools just don’t work as well).

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