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.

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.

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.

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).

How Does Google Know if I Copy?

One of the common questions that comes up is “Do search engines like Google really know if I shoplift content from other web sites to update my own?” Another is “Out of all the millions of web sites, how can they know?”

Ask  yourself the following: if Google isn’t also indexing those sites, how would it index your site? How would such a thing as SEO exist? That’s what search engines do – they scan your site for content. There’d be no SEO value in adding content to your site, if search engines weren’t aware of it, or aware of the same content on other sites. And Google reads your site just like a human being – top to bottom, front page to back.

Here are the results you may find from lifting content:

SEO decline. This happens by rewarding the site that had the duplicate content first (it’s copy-worthy – that’s an endorsement – rank it higher) and lowering rankings for the site that had it later – i.e. lifted the content (it’s not original – no sense in presenting it high in search results). When I post, Google is usually aware of my content within seconds. I know – I monitor it. I have automatic scans in place for content theft, but still – I know that a plague falls on the house of anyone who rips it off, because of the way SEO works. [Want to see a Google example? Click the image at right.]

Legal issues. One of these days, the site owner is likely to run his popular material through copyscape.com and see who is using it without permission. [Want to see a Copyscape example? Click the image at right.] Here are the questions they can pursue: “Are you a business? How long have you profited from having my content on your site? How much money did you make in that time, and what percentage of it is due me?” If you could write stellar content and just wait for people to rip it off, you could actually make a business out of it, with a good attorney. It’s the same with multimedia content: grabbing images (photos, graphs, etc.) off the internet that have not been explicitly declared ‘public domain’ and for which you do not have an appropriate license, or are obeying the terms of that license. You’re probably exposed at that point, unless you can make a case for “fair use” – a rule which has its own vague terms, precisely so courts can apply the rule un-evenly and favor whom they wish. We’ve written about fair use on this blog, so we won’t revisit it here, but we’re not attorneys and aren’t competent to offer real legal advice, so if you have questions about it, you should consult an attorney.

Ethical issues. Keep in mind that plagiarism is plagiarism. If it was cheating when you copied that book into your essay in school and represented it as your own, instead of properly attributing it to the author, it’s plagiarism when you do it with web content. If you are going to attribute it, that’s better but doesn’t mitigate the other issues.

Public perception. When someone goes to bookmark your content in a social bookmarking site like digg.com, they will likely get a response that this is duplicate content that has already been bookmarked. This exposes you as a content lifter. Are you a business? What are the potential consequences of a client looking at your site as just a collection of things grabbed from other web sites?

Low social value. Focusing on just SEO is a common mistake of those who believe in the mythology of automatic marketing, and it misses the whole point of why SEO works the way it does. Fresh, original, frequently updated content is rewarded in search engines PRECISELY because that’s what people are searching for, want to interact with, and are responding to. If you’re just slapping in stuff you find on the web content, generally speaking, you’re not really respecting your prospects, how they think, and what they want – you’re just feeding them filler – which means you think people are basically dumb in their buying responses and will warm to any old thing. You’re trying to fool them with fake attention. It’s like a pat on the head – just a bit too patronizing – and if you think that doesn’t come through, subtly, there you go again underestimating your prospects. You wouldn’t put up with it, so why should they?

A dynamic web site is a social entity – an interactive environment. If you really don’t care enough, and don’t respect the visitor enough, that you’re just dumping things into it from other sites, why should they care and why should they stick around? Content is a social compact – you’re promising to be genuine, authentic, and alive. It’s easy to say “blogging didn’t work for me” – it might make us feel better, but it’s really the assumptions we’re acting on that make the difference. Treat people like people – talk plainly – and you’ll earn an audience. Take shortcuts, and it’s like one of those “filler speakers” for hire that will show up at your company for a fee and talk about whatever – give them a topic and a time frame and they’ll come speak “dynamically” for that 30-minutes or an hour – from puppy dogs to sales to motivation to time management. Wow. It’s like serving cheap crackers and cheese whiz at a convention. Everyone’s thinking “how long do I have to stay here?” That’s not a buyer response.

And if I seem blunt about this, it’s because you’re up against the obsolete marketing-think of our grandparents, where people would often buy whatever you throw at them, if it was reasonably new, because there just weren’t so many products on the shelf, and there just weren’t that many plumbers in our town. It was a seller’s marketplace. It doesn’t work that way any more. Look at the shampoo aisle at your supermarket and start counting. Check the phonebook – that antique they keep throwing on the porch every year – how many of your profession are there in your area? Now, we actually have to respect our audience enough to be real. It’s a buyer’s marketplace now. That’s the meaning off social media, of blogging, and even of Google, my friends. The assumption implicit in any successful internet marketing activity today is that we’re searchers, explorers, social people – instead of the web being a ‘marketing engine’, it’s a marketing conversation. It’s more like coffee hour than the sermon, more like a ball game with friends than a scorecard and silence, more like personal coaching than ‘here’s your gym badge, over there are the machines’.

I’m going to push this farther. So much of the time, at Market Moose, we’re offering a corrective – nudging people away from the pitfalls (we’ve all fallen into them – that’s how we know they’re there). But our mission is also to coax clients toward a newer, more current, more realistic vision (as in corresponds with the new reality) for their marketing. So here goes. It’s not just about your marketing. It’s about your business – the substance of who you are as a business and how your business works. I’m often hearing people say, “in my field, marketing doesn’t work” – but I notice that their successful competitors don’t think that at all. In every field, in every locale, someone is making money and being successful marketing their business. I notice that same crowd is often saying, “here’s how I work, we all do the same things, this is what I do, it hasn’t changed in 40 years”, etc. In other words, they’re not adapting or responding to the new reality – they’re telling people how it’s going to be, what they’re willing to do, and doing the take it or leave it thing. However you slice it, this is the old way and, yeah, if your business doesn’t change, you can have stellar marketing, but it’s just a facade. What’s needed is a fundamentally different approach to your own work. It’s amazing how much the new marketing then starts to make sense.

Ever driven up to a run-down roadside motel and heard “$79″… and when you say, “gosh that’s expensive for this!” they just repeated, “$79, plus tax, plus key deposit”. They get away with that for one reason only – there’s no alternative. The moment I open a motel across the street that’s clean, with well-lit parking, hot coffee, and a security guard, they’re gone.

The things we need to be thinking about are:

• How can we increase and maintain better communications with existing clients – communications that go beyond just the purchasing process?
• How can we begin a conversation with the public about our field of work – but, more importantly, about the aspects of it that the public is actually thinking about?
• How can we give prospects a way to stay connected to us, stay in our orbit, even before they’re ready to switch to us or include us in their business plans?
• How can we position ourselves, in all our locales, or in our particular specializations and niches, as the resident expert – the one that is the clear choice – without throwing a lot of sales language at people (“Hey, I’m the best. For quality, buy from me!” -  bleh)?
• How can I build a wider network of people (and where are they all hanging out these days?) that isn’t just people that are immediately “valuable” to me, but anyone and everyone I know, meet, or have a conversation with? – Remember the insurance agent analogy I gave in the video on new marketing.

More of us don’t want to walk in and shake your hand, we want to add each other to our Facebook. I don’t want you to mail me those mortgage rates – I want to see them by following you in Twitter. I don’t want your five page static web site that never changes. I want you to think about what I’m thinking about and give me some insight. Ever visit one of those old-fashioned personal home pages from 10 years ago – it had someone’s favorite colors, they’re favorite rock bands, a bad photo, etc? Ineffectual business web sites are still like that. Well, individuals are way ahead of a lot of companies that expect their business. Individuals are involved in constantly updated statuses and always adding funny stories, interesting thoughts, etc – to their pages (which are now in Facebook and Twitter more than they are in Tripod and Geocities). Businesses are playing catch-up. And not just in how they ‘market’, but in how they do business as a whole. Sometimes, it’s time for an overhaul not of just your web site, but of who you are as a company, and how you operate. It’s that, or join the dying part of the industry.

I have three marketing mentors – three people that, for me, have summed up successful marketing right now:

• Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People). What’s funny is that web 2.0 and social media, like blogging and Twitter, are seeing the fruition of a market based on Carnegie’s thinking. And yet Carnegie started this in 1934. What’s also funny is that it quickly got the reputation from people who hadn’t read Carnegie, of being manipulative – it was actually thought to be more ‘honest and straightforward’ to just make or do stuff and assume people would buy it, tell them endlessly to buy it by bombarding them with ads saying it’s good, and so on. Carnegie saw that stuff as antique back in its heyday. There were Mad Men and there was Carnegie the visionary. And you know his primary idea? Simple: if you genuinely take an interest in people, in general, whether or not they can do anything for you, or seem immediately ‘valuable’ (as a commodity) – if you just interact with them, meet them, add them to your social network as people – you’ll never have to seriously chase business. You won’t have to constantly pitch them on how your services are the best, etc. Again, we talked about the insurance agent in video on new marketing and those guys are disciples of Carnegie.
• Seth Godin (Tribes, The Purple Cow, etc.). I don’t even like everything Seth is interested in or talks about (some of his books are, in my opinion, overly focused on corporate life). But you can’t argue that he can really nail down the underlying ethos and thinking behind the new marketing – the new way of doing business.  Tribes is short (read it in one sitting), and really gets you there.
• Google. Just looking at the meaning behind Google’s activities tells you what has changed, often before it actually has. Google is prophetic. Google understands that we’re offloading more of our activity and thinking online – and that includes our social networking, our buying decision process, and our expectations for interaction. Google knows that documents aren’t static anymore – they’re evolving social tools. That’s why Google is reading your home page like a human being, using artificial intelligence, instead of the old-fashioned way of just picking up key words some SEO person inserted on the back end. They get it, they’re helping drive it, and the rest of us are learning from it.

Well, I think we’ve answered the key questions. Market Moose is available for consulting, including brainstorming for your business. Let us know if we can help.

Quoting News in your Blog

Some blogs are just running excerpts from news articles. These are generally worthless for marketing and have negative SEO value. We’ve written about duplicate content before, so we won’t go into that here. But there are times when you want to use part of a news article in your posts.

The first issue is permission. You can use a certain amount of text under “fair use” but you can’t quote the entire article or a huge segment without reprint rights. Often reprint rights are accessible – you just contact the paper via their web site about reprint rights and specify your reason and that it’s for a business blog, etc.

However, under “fair use”, you could probably reasonably quote a couple of paragraphs without a problem. We’re not giving a professional rule of thumb or legal advice about the length of a quotation – fair use is vague in the law – intentionally – so they can go after people selectively rather than evenly. But personally this writer will quote a couple of paragraphs at a time without incident.

Assuming you’re going to do that, for maximum SEO (search engine optimization), quote the piece in the context of your own post, article, or blog entry – with at least 100-200 words before and after. Examples are [here], [here], and [here].

If there’s enough of a lead-in, the article will be more likely to get treated as unique by google, even with the quotation in it. That way you actually get seo value out of it. Plus, it’s bad form to just slap a quotation on your site with nothing else – because visitors see it as lowering the value of your site – there’s nothing there they couldn’t have gotten elsewhere. Best practice is put quotations in the context of you making your own set of points.

Originality is king. If you see something in the news you just have to use, write a short (less than 500 words) article that’s the article that *you* would have written for the NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, or whatever, and include the quotation section in the middle of it, at the appropriate point. It’s fine to even take an article in a completely different direction than the original writer, because that’s precisely the point – borrowing the quotation but using it in the context of your own purposes and direction. You don’t want to represent it out of context, but you’re entitled to do more than just mimic someone else’s article – again added value is what’s important – don’t make it a rip off of someone else’s piece, because then they just don’t need your site – they can go to the source. Remember, search engines make the big internet small.

Lastly, you could include just a link to another article, with a few comments, but that’s bad form. It sends people off site without good cause. Plus – just a link, by itself, can lower SEO (you’re giving away juice). Instead, put a link to the original article in the quotation source. Like this:

Mr. Elienberg wasn’t a Comcast employee, but a so-called independent contractor working for a separate company. This month, he sued both companies, for allegedly depriving him and other contractors of overtime pay and benefits by not considering them employees.The case highlights a perennial issue for employers that is gaining new prominence during the recession. Lawyers say employers are trying to avoid hiring full-time employees by tapping contractors, as workers seeking better pay and benefits turn to the courts. – [Wall Street Journal, Oct 19, 2009]

Besides, chances are the link is going to break at some point, when the source site overhauls their site, removes the article, or starts charging for it. Block quotes are nice, by the way: no need for quote marks or italics with a block quote, and it’s appropriate for quoting in extenso and for visually displaying the quotation in a more interesting way.

That’s it. Use quotations and links judiciously, be original, don’t duplicate other sites wholesale (it’s getting you nowhere and ruining your SEO), and don’t quote our of context, but do use visual styling, and do express your own ideas in your posts. Market Moose provides consulting on internet marketing strategy to small businesses.

Audio: Do I Really Need a Consultant?

The Value Proposition: “Is Small Business Consulting Worth It?” From the Market Moose Podcast.

Interview of Market Moose founder Daniel DiGriz by Steve Pruneau (Free Agent Source). Daniel explains how consulting services, specifically in the area of internet marketing, can pay off for small businesses, even if you’re not used to working with consultants.

“Why re-invent the marketing wheel, by trying to learn it all yourself?”

Music: “Recercar 2” by Paul Berget (Magnatune label)

Standard Podcasts [16:58m]: Play in Popup | Download

Daniel: I’m Daniel DiGriz with Market Moose Internet Marketing, we help small businesses grow by building an effective Internet marketing plan.

Steve: I’m Steve Pruneau from Free Agent Source, we create the best of both worlds for independent professionals and entrepreneurs. All the resources of a traditional company, combined with the freedom of freelancers and entrepreneurs.

Daniel: And this is the Market Moose Podcast bringing you interviews and insights to help your business market and grow on the web.

Steve: So Daniel today we’re going to talk about, how is it that consulting can create value for small business, is it really worth the cost?

Daniel: We get that question a lot. Because a lot of businesses start out, especially small businesses not being used to paying people for ideas. It’s hard if you’re a one person shop for instance, to pay another person for just what they think or just what seems like talking. But in actuality, spending money on consulting can be one of the most effective and wisest business investments you can make. After all,  you’re a specialist in what you so whether you’re an attorney, an appraiser, a psychologist, etc. So, getting a specialist involved to help you do something like Internet market. Someone that brings knowledge and experience that you might not have, somebody that can bring an aerial view to the topic and give you some real direction, so that you’re not just kind of swimming in the wind, hanging a website out there, handing out business cards. That’s often the most effective way to spend your money, a lot cheaper than just throwing piles of dollars at an Internet mechanic that builds and builds but you don’t know whether it’s going to be effective.

Steve: Yeah but, a lot of us don’t want to be marketers. We have our own trade skill and our own profession that we want to basically get on with and how do we know that we’re really going to get something tangible back?

Daniel: That’s a great question. The beauty of consulting is this pay as you go. Right? now, a lot of people of course try to lock you into a contract, but I would avoid that really at all cost. An effective consultant lives on his reputation and lives on the strength that his advice and his coaching and his guidance and his expertise. So you buy a few hours, you start out with an Internet Marketing Consultant for example, and you see where it goes. and if that person is not delivering tangible results, if you’re not getting return on your investments, then you stop and you find the right person. Unlike hiring, sort of a technical specialist who’s knee deep in things you may not understand and has you locked into a contract and you’re already throwing huge piles of dollars at it. This is actually an effective way to make sure and measure that you’re getting tangible results.

Steve: OK, but isn’t this really just somebody’s opinion and couldn’t I find all these opinions on the web?

Daniel: Well that’s a great question. So, you really asked two questions though. One is, is it just someone’s opinion? And two, couldn’t I just get this information on the web? So let me deal with them one at a time. So, the first question, some of it is going to have flavor from a person’s personality, from their perspective, from their experience. That’s exactly one of the reasons you should be involved with a consultant as a small business. You may have a lot of experience with some technical facets of Internet Marketing for example, you may have built a website once, or you may have sent out an email marketing campaign. But nothing really compares to someone who’s had the experience invested in these things for years. So yeah, there’s a little bit of perspective if you will, I wouldn’t just call it opinion. There’re some real key points that you’ll find most Internet Marketers saying to you over and over again and so you can do web research and if you hear something from your Internet Marketing Consultant that sounds far fetched and way out there, there’s no harm whatsoever in Googling some of the terminology he’s using and see if what he’s telling you is something that other people are talking about.

But the other question that you asked is, “Couldn’t I just get this information off the web?” And the answer is actually, “Yeah.” Maybe a lot of Internet marketing people wouldn’t tell you that. But the truth is, depending on how many hours you have in hand and how much time you’re willing to spend, not only to get this information, but to sift through it, weed out the stuff that’s just snake oil. Because there’s a lot of that out there, there’s a mine field of people saying, “Hey, instant results. Guaranteed stuff.” And when you read their pseudo essays you’re looking at, “Pay here”, at the bottom and a PayPal link. So, you’ve got to be careful about the so-called information that’s out there. But you can sift through this stuff and a reasonable, intelligent person can go through it. Often times, there’s some terminology involved and there’s research on the research. So if I read an article that’s got six terms in it I don’t understand, I may have to open several more web browsers to really get what the person’s trying to tell me. There’s absolutely nothing to stop you from becoming your own accounting expert, your own billing expert, your own book keeping expert. But there’s a reason why small businesses tend to get an accountant involved or tend to outsource that. The same thing is true with Internet marketing. In the time that it takes you to do that research, it’s often easier for you to just go out and get another client, you could have been doing other work by now and the money that you make off of that should more than pay for your consulting professionals.

Steve: So is that what the value proposition is? Is it that, the money I want to spend here should get me the knowledge and I guess, the results faster and more efficiently than if I were to do it myself? Is that it?

Daniel: Well that’s always I think, the quotient isn’t it? In small business, it’s time versus money. So, one of the things for instance, I’ve done a little work in project consulting and one of the things that always comes up is we can do just about anything. Which do you want to spend more of? More time or more money? So, as a small business owner that’s really the case too. What you’re doing is you’re saving money by saving time. So you can invest that time in what you do best and your first question was, “Hey, I’m a real estate appraiser, I want to spend my time appraising and have somebody else do the marketing, I don’t necessarily want to become an expert.” That’s exactly why you get a consultant involved. You can spend those hours doing what you do best and making money and generating income or you can spend that time saving money by doing all the research yourself. I publish a blog called, the Rules of Work, rulesofwork.com, if you want to visit that, and one of the points we made in a recent article on that blog is that, it’s counterintuitive. But the best way a small entrepreneur or small business can spend their time, is not saving money it’s making money. If you look at successful entrepreneurs, that’s where their time is devoted. So, if I spend several hours to save myself ten dollars, if I spend a lot of time researching online because I don’t want to pay somebody the ten bucks it takes for them to do a small task for me. Have I spent my time effectively versus making three phone calls and getting a client that day. So that’s where the value proposition I think, comes in.

Steve: Wow! That’s very profound.

Daniel: Well, thanks. We like to hear that here at Market Moose.

Steve: Do you think some people just have a hard time getting over the fact that I’m actually going to put some money out there and all i’m getting back is this information, this consulting advice. Is that a problem for some of your clients?

Daniel: You bet. It’s a problem for some of our prospects but it hasn’t been a problem for some of our clients and I’m not being smart-alecky, but I want to tell you the difference. The difference is, yeah, if you don’t know what you’re getting, if you’re reaching out for an intangible, it’s kind of like the old P.T. Barnum thing, right? P.T. Barnum was famous for getting people inside of a circus tent with various oddities and things. But a lot of them were tricks, “Step this way to the Great Egress,” and when you went there, you were outside again. You paid five dollars to go to the Great Egress but it turned out, it was just leaving the tent because an Egress is an Exit. So people are wondering, “When I pay my five bucks and I go into the tent, is it going to be a scam or am I going to get something that I can carry home with me?” And that’s a fair question, which is one of the reasons why most consultants start with an initial consultation. So we do that, we have a free thirty minute consultation to start with. If we don’t deliver value in that thirty minutes or if your consultant, whoever that may be, whether it’s an accounting consultant or an appraisal consultant or a legal consultant, if they don’t deliver value in the first thirty minutes to an hour, chances are they’re not going to deliver value consistently over time. So yeah, you want the consultant to prove themselves and that’s why I say that, for our prospects, sure it’s an issue. But once we do the initial consultation for them, an overwhelming number of them become our clients. That’s us, we’re not trying to laud our own services. But that’s what any good consultant should be able to say.

Steve: Let’s talk about a different type of client and this might be someone who, maybe they’re willing to take the leap on the value proposition, but suppose it’s somebody who really doesn’t know much about the Web. Of course they’ll know their own trade and profession but wouldn’t know URL from HTML. How do you feel about working with those type of people and do they fit within the Market Moose client base?

Daniel: Sure, that’s a great question. Well, first let me say, not everybody in the world goes with our company Market Moose. I want to broaden that question and just say, “Is this the kind of person that an Internet Marketing Consultant would be helpful to.” So, there’s a couple of answers, some people don’t know anything about the Web and maybe it’s a generational thing or maybe it’s just that they spend their time with a tool box crawling under a house, and those are perfectly acceptable reasons. So, I will say that, most people do need to learn a little bit in order to be effective. You can’t simply outsource 100% even if you can outsource 98%. You’re going to have to know, I mean even just you making a judgement about what to pay for, involves a certain amount of consulting. If you come to me, for example, and you say, “Hey I want a website, because I’m convinced that a website is going to make me money.” It is my duty as an Internet Marketing Consultant not to just take your money. It’s my duty to say, “Look, things have really changed over the last five years. In the old days when there was only ten thousand websites out there, you throw up a website, it never changes, it has five pages, it’s like a static business card and you walk away, and if you have a website, yeah chances are you will get some visitors.” These days when there’s a hundred thousand websites, that’s really different, and that’s just your industry. We’re not even talking about other sites that bleed off your clientele. So in that market, it’s my duty to say, “a website alone, putting all your eggs in one basket isn’t necessarily the best choice. Maybe you should think about, having a website sure, but also doing a little bit of marketing in Facebook, or doing a little bit of marketing in Twitter, and we can kind of guide you through the mine field and make that easy to understand.”

It’s the duty also of an Internet Marketing Consultant to speak in plain English. I’m not going to throw a lot of terminology out there. The mythology is, well the word Technogeeks, right, and that may have been true again five, six years ago when all you had to do was throw up a website and hire a geek to do it. These days you really need somebody that understands small business,  how business works and how different kinds of industries really do grow and get clientele and then can talk to you just like you and I are talking now. So that’s one answer, the other answer is, that often our clients will start out with something tangible. I mean here at Market Moose we do hands-on work, mechanic work, so you can come to us and say, “I want a website.” We can say, “Sure,” and we’ll build it for you. That’s hands dirtying, toolbox type of work. But in that process, you’ll learn things because through our interaction you’ll pick up that, “Here’s why I’m putting these words in this portion of your site. OK, you’ve told me you want to include your resume on your website, let me give you a way to do that better,” “what if we format it like this because this is going to get you more clients. This is going to appeal to Google better if you do it this way,” and through that process, there’s a little bit of consulting involved and you start picking up the value of it. So, I think a lot of people, they start with a tangible thing in summary, and I think that a lot of people, basically it’s our duty to sometimes not just say yes and grab the fistful of dollars, but to push back a little bit and say that, “Not everything that you’re about to throw money at, is going to be the most effective.” And that’s consulting too, usually part of that free consultation we give at the beginning.

Steve: Yeah, I wasn’t sure you were going to touch on that and I was going to say. Now even if you’re a little bit concerned about being able to understand any area that’s new to you, if you take the jump, you get in touch with somebody who does know, then just that exchange is going to bring familiarity and confidence. And it’s why we have tour guides, it’s why we go with somebody who’s already been there. Just segueing to another point that you made, even though your firm or any other consultant that you hired to do something, generally they can’t do a hundred percent of it. Inevitably some of it comes back, and we have to do some of the work. I really wish I could hire a personal trainer who would really make me ripped.

Daniel: You and me both buddy. I’ve got a few pounds that I’d like to just put on his plate instead of mine.

Steve: Yeah, and inevitably what happens is, I actually pay them money to tell me what to do. But the reality is, if I knew a hundred percent of what to do, I wouldn’t have to pay him the money, and they do actually reduce the amount of time that I would spend. The same thing is true with the dentists. You’re paying money to the dentist and what happens at the end of the appointment? “Well, you really need to do this and that differently and now come back and show me the results.” And I think for some people who really want to avoid that, you can probably avoid a lot of it, but in the end you’re going to have to be involved. I don’t know of any business people that can’t be a hundred percent not involved. And so, if we are in business, I think we’re stuck. By the way, if you ever find a way that we can avoid being involved, let me know and I want to pursue that.

Daniel: Yeah, both with Internet Marketing and with losing weight. You bring up two great points. So one of them is, Gee, when we pay consultants sometimes we’re concerned that, “Hey, all I walked away with is advice this time on what to do better,” and of course that’s exactly why we pay. I joined the gym recently and the first day at the gym, I thought it was going to be like any other gym, and I walked in and I have a great doctor, I really do, but my doctor had given me advice and the advice was, lose fifty pounds, just the kind of thing you were talking about. So I go in to the gym and I say, “I need to lose fifty pounds and my doctor tells me that the way to do it is everyday I need to come in here and just pound it out for thirty minutes until there’s sweat dripping down my face and go as hard as I can.” And the personal trainer spoke up and said, “No, you don’t. Your doctor is almost right, you do need to lose the fifty pounds, we can tell that by looking at you, but what’s really necessary is for you to find your target heart rate and stay at your target heart rate. And that’s what our job is, is to help you find that. So we’re going to advice you.” So they modified the advice. So the beauty of that, and one of the reasons I’m still a member of that gym, is that I didn’t just go out and run as fast as I can around my block for thirty minutes everyday, which wouldn’t have been an efficient burning of calories. I wouldn’t have lost the weight as quickly. But I lost ten pounds in thirty days because I stayed within the target heart rate and followed the advice. So it was totally worth it. I could have done that myself and saved the cost of the gym, but I’d still be running around the block wondering why I have to eat a ton of calories to put that stuff back.

So, the other issue is owner involvement, and yeah, Internet Marketing does not work without some owner involvement, and so people always say, “How involved do I have to be?” “I don’t have a lot of time, I don’t really want to do this.” The answer is, “Look, the owner involvement stuff, is the fun stuff. You hire me for the boring mechanic work and you hire me to educate you and give you the main sense of direction, but if you’re willing to spend thirty minutes a week on your business doing some stuff that’s kind of fun, you can grow your business significantly through Internet marketing.” You can hire us to do the specialist work, but thirty minutes a week, if you don’t have thirty minutes a week, ten minutes every other day, five minutes everyday on the average. If you don’t have that, your business is not going to grow anyway and no amount of throwing money at it or buying an online solution that, “Hey, I’ll spend a thousand dollars on this, they guarantee results.” None of that is going to be effective. When somebody calls you up on the phone and says, “Nope, you don’t have to do anything, just give us your credit card number and the address of your website.” Do not give out your credit card number, it’s not going to be effective.

Internet marketing is just like invoicing, it’s just like accounting, it may feel like pulling teeth sometimes, it may feel like a trip to the dentist, but it’s part of your business, it has to be done and it requires a certain amount of your involvement. You can’t just go to the dentist for a cleaning very six months, you have to brush your teeth and floss, right. And we all hear that and maybe we floss more than we did before. The same thing happens with Internet marketing. I tell people often, “Hey you need to update your website, you can’t just leave it sitting there in a coma because if there’s no signs of life, why should anybody interact with it or give you an order.” So people say, “Oh yeah, I know, it’s been three weeks.” and I’m like, “OK, but you got to get it in gear.” and so I become the dentist, you’re totally right. But without a dentist or without a personal trainer, I’d really hate to think where I’d be right now.

So, again i’m Daniel DiGriz with Market Moose Internet Marketing and we help small businesses grow by building an effective Internet marketing plan.

Steve: And I’m Steve Pruneau, I’m a guest. It’s been my pleasure to speak with you Daniel, thank you.

Daniel: So this is the Market Moose Podcast, bringing you interviews and insights to help your business market and grow itself on the Web. Thanks very much for joining us today.

Internet Marketing: How to Fail Successfully

The Negative Power of Self-Fulfilling Prophesy and Retranslating in your Internet Marketing. How we help ourselves fail successfully.

Sometimes, to get a message across, you have to write in ‘the negative’. When what’s needed is a cultural paradigm shift on the part of small and medium business owners to be effective in their internet marketing, merely saying “you gotta do this, and this, and this” doesn’t always get through. People tend to reinterpret (retranslate) what you say to fit with what they already think, and then they’re not actually hearing you. One of the ways we like to be different is being blunt, a little bit in your face, and showing you the recipe for failure, not just the prescription for success. Why? Because so many people are cooking their own marketing ‘meth’, so to speak, and it’s starving their business of both new clientelle and extended relationships with existing clientelle, both of which are the keys to growing their business. So here goes – we’ll start with some of the ‘negative’ things that business owners say about their own marketing (or lack thereof):

“I don’t think blogging works in my situation”: Usually when we hear this, we look at a couple of things: 1. How consistently the person has blogged. If it’s once or twice a month, better plan on years to get substantive results. Consistency, frequency, originality, and adding value are the rules. If you retranslate that into “when I get time”,  you’ve already decided to be unsuccessful. 10min every other day – 30min/week will do it – it takes as long as a re-run of some dumb sitcom. 2. What they are posting. If it’s mostly about you and your business, and not about things of interest to your audience, or its material lifted from other sites, plan on it never getting a readership. These two things really amount to almost all of it. There are no instant results from blogging, only substantial results, and only if you follow the rules: consistent & frequent, original and add value. Don’t know what to write? That’s what consulting is for. Whether it’s us or someone else, get someone who can coach you on what to do. You wouldn’t try to get fast running track without a coach, would you? That’s a recipe for a tweaked muscle and a short overall run.

Some people retranslate this into, “I’ll pay someone to do it for me.” Yeah, good luck. The big corporations tried that, too. Probloggers for hire. If you’ve got that much money, knock yourself out, but what they found is that there’s no substitute for the involvement of the owners and stakeholders of the business. That’s why anchor people blog now, even if they’re not always the sharpest tacks, rather than some geek working on his own in a blogging closet in the back. Don’t retranslate. Learn, grow yourself, and get involved in your own business – and yes marketing is your business. If you’re not involved in your marketing, you’re not involved in a big chunk of it – you’ve abdicated, and your prospects will follow suit.

“I joined Twitter (or Facebook) and it hasn’t generated any business for me”: Usually, we look at the following:. 1. Have you done little but join? If your focus is on merely having an account and expecting people to rush the doors, cancel the account. The time is better spent in the food court at the mall. 2. Are you spamming? If you’re mostly posting your prices, service lists, advertising language, and letting people know you’re available, you’re doing anti-marketing. Stop it. Silence is more effective than that. At least with silence, you don’t chase anyone away. 3. Have you been consistent over time? Another word for “tweeting” at Twitter is “micro-blogging” and some of the same rules apply, even if it’s the size of a cell phone text message at Twitter or a paragraph on Facebook. 4. Have you integrated Facebook and Twitter with your web site? If not, why not? – you’re wasting opportunity. Why do three times the work of maintaining three things, when you can tie them together and be more successful focusing on one? Don’t understand what to do? That’s what consulting is for, once again.

“I have a web site and never got any business from it”: This is a big one. We look at several things.

1. Is it your grandfather’s web site? Web time moves much faster, like dog years. If it’s the web site from that long gone era where you put up a bunch of static pages that never get updated (about us, contact us) and that’s all it does, you’re right – it’s doomed. At that point it’s just a complicated phone book entry, and you could have got your phone number on the net for free. That’s the only people who’ll use it anyway – people who already know your business and just need the contact info. Web sites with nothing going on are in a web coma. People might visit, but they don’t stay long. The “if you build it, they will come” only ever worked in Field of Dreams. Web sites with good dynamic content will always trounce web sites with static content, both in search engines and with visitors. People retranslate this into, “I’ll change the colors once in a while, or post a new photo next quarter.” They’re not listening. Those things have little or no search value, and every time a search engine rescans your site for real, substantive, text-based updates, and there are none, it ranks it lower. It’s not going to wake hordes of buyers into a frenzy of contacting you, either. Sorry, but it’s been this way for the last few years. The blogging era changed everything, even if no one notified most of us. That site that’s been around for years and used to do well? It doesn’t need a visual makeover (which is what people who are retranslating throw their money at). It might need that, but first and foremost it needs consistent attention to dynamic content. In granddad’s day, you threw it up like a billboard and hoped for the best. In the post-blogging era, you update your site for 10min every other day.
2. Is it stolen? People don’t like that word, because the internet makes it so incredibly easy to lift copy from other people’s web sites, but we like the shock value, because it communicates that that’s exactly how search engines treat it. Call it what you want – “duplicate”, “borrowed”, judge or not judge, but search engines automatically detect and bury sites that take content from other sites. It’s what they’re best at – scanning your pages, and comparing them with other results. Better to have one page of original content (you’ve seen those successful niche sites) than 25 pages of plagiarism. Stop stealing – it’s marketing suicide! Original content trounces everything else. A search engine that ranked 10 duplicate web sites at the top would be abandoned by users. Search engines survive by rewarding the originator, punishing the copies, and selling ads alongside great results. A lot of people retranslate this and “rewrite” the content they’re lifting. They’re not listening. Even if it’s 70% similar, it gets picked up as duplicate content, and the site is buried accordingly. Besides, your site is a clone, so  you’ve given people no reason to do business with you vs. the other guys – you’re not respecting how your clients actually think. Shoplifting content is like shoplifting from K-mart – by the time you do that much work with such little result, you could have just done it the right way and come out way ahead.
3. Does the navigation suck? If you have more than 6-8 buttons on the left, and more than 5-6 at the top, it’s like a pileup on the freeway – cluttered, chaotic, and people will go around it if they can. If you have that much original content, that’s great, but you need drop-down menus. There’s also a rational organizational process to navigation and layout, and visitors have certain expectations that need to be accounted for, even if you do it creatively.
4. Is it all about you? Have you treated your web site like an extended online advertisement? If that’s all it is, and it gives nothing of interest to visitors beyond “buy my stuff” – if it contributes nothing, or worse yet – all it contributes is links to other people’s contributions, then it has no marketing value – in fact, it’s a negative, not a zero. Why do you think search engines punish sites for having too many outbound links and reward sites that everyone links to? Don’t give away your juice. Marketing and advertising are not the same thing. And people don’t need that long to read an ad, anyway. If you’re going to advertise instead of market, pay the $250 and put a short ad on Facebook. It will also have a much lower return on investment than your web site would, if you were using it successfully for marketing, but if you’re not going to, then you’re not going to, and you’re reduced to advertising being all you have. Effective web sites offer original insights, analysis, and advice. A lot of people retranslate this into paying a service to put their news feed on their site, but they’re not listening – original content – not someone else’s contribution, but yours. Once it comes from somewhere else, I don’t need you anymore – I cut out the middle man and go to the source. It’s not just giving to the March of Dimes – businesses with successful internet marketing are *involved* – in the sense that they’re giving their time and attention, their insight and expertise, to earn the status of resident expert.
5. Have you staked everything on just the web site? Does it have many ways to connect with you (e.g. social media, comments, subscribing, etc), or is it inviting a “Hmm. That’s a nice web site. Well, gotta go now.” (lots of hits, few hits converted into contacts). That’s what happens quite often to those $3000 flash web sites – very pretty – visitors pat it on the head and move on. Of course, if the site is static (infrequently updated) or just a sales flyer (it’s all about you), the chance that people will use the opportunity to connect plummets dramatically. But a site that does the other things right is just throwing away opportunities by *not* providing lots of ways to connect and interact, especially in a web 2.0 world of social media like blogging, facebook, and twitter. Ever felt like everyone around you was having a conversation that you weren’t part of? If you’re wondering what the heck to do with facebook and twitter, they really are. Some consulting time is useful here – you need to learn, from someone who knows, how to extend your brand (your business identity) to the places where all the people have gone, without alienating them by old-fashioned spamming. Catch up, grow, learn something new, or become obsolete and watch the cobwebs grow on the web site – those are the choices.

“Internet marketing doesn’t work in my industry, niche, or local market”: This is the most important one, because it’s a statement that successful internet marketing, for you, isn’t possible. Substitute “blogging”, “social media”, “web sites”, or just ‘marketing” in general, and if you’re saying it won’t work for you, you’re right, you’re done, and your consolation will be the consolation of all self-fulfilling prophesies – you aren’t wasting your time on something that isn’t going to help. One of our clients is a gym, and they help their clients with the same thing: “I can’t lose weight,” “I’m too old to change”, “I’m not strong enough to work out”, “I don’t think I can change my lifestyle”. Clients of every business have self-fulfilling negative prophesies that they tell themselves. Your clients have them too, even if you don’t know what they are. In fact, knowing what they are can help you open up new avenues of service by creating new avenues of possibility. And we’re not talking about touchy-feely rhetoric.

If you’re a real estate appraiser and you know that a lot of home sellers are settling for bottom dollar on their homes, because the market is down, could a pre-sales appraisal show them a more accurate value, and possibly indicate things to emphasize to get more value? If you’re a home inspector, wouldn’t a pre-sales inspection give them info on what things to repair or improve to optimize their sales position? But those clients are out there thinking, “I’ll have to settle for what I can get. There’s nothing else I can do.” You see? Negative self-fulfilling prophesy. And when they take a fraction of the value, and sell the house, they’ll think it proves they were right, and “at least I didn’t waste time trying to get what it’s worth”. Self-fulfilling prophesy. That’s a marketing opportunity screaming out for you, if you’re in that industry. It’s the equivalent of marketing suicidal language on their part, and it can be the same with your internet marketing.

Just because you don’t see how it works yet, doesn’t mean it can”t. It maybe hasn’t, because you haven’t done it right, and it maybe won’t, because you aren’t availing yourself of the best advice or consulting out there, or are retranslating and not following it. Sort of like following the advice to go on a vegetable diet, and then eating five pounds of starchy vegetables at dinner – or hearing “this pill, along with proper diet and exercise” and then you’re just taking the pill, and the rest is an afterthought. That isn’t what your doctor meant.

There isn’t a single industry, niche, or local market in which one of two things isn’t true: a) someone is successfully doing internet marketing. b) no one is and good gosh, it’s wide open, and someone is going to figure that out and corner it successfully. And that brings us to one last thing.

“There’s too much competition. I can’t possibly be successful against the other guys.” Internet marketing isn’t interchangeable. If you think it is, you haven’t been listening – you’re retranslating. The fact that there’s heavy competition in your area, therefore cannot mean internet marketing is likely to be unsuccessful. It’s another negative self-fulfilling prophesy with a bogus reason attached to it: “There are too many of them, and only one of me.” That’s your greatest advantage. There’s only one of you. The new web 2.0 marketing *depends* utterly on defining your business differently than your peers. We often hear people say, “I do the same things as every other plumber.” Then that’s your first marketing problem. Notice we didn’t say internet marketing. You’re stuck – you can’t do marketing at all. You can advertise, but good luck with that – rate of return is going to be even lower than most ads, precisely because you have no market differentiators. Your first order of business is to start doing things differently. Find three things that you *will* do differently to deliver added value to your clients. Brainstorm. If you only give it 5-minutes of your attention, why should prospective clients pay more attention to your business? Click on, click off, same as the other guys. You either involve yourself in the marketing of your business, at the core or, you’re right – it’s hopeless – just not for the reasons mentioned.

Hear this now: Any business in which the core owners and stakeholders are not involved in the core marketing, will be unsuccessful in their internet marketing. Web 2.0 makes that clear. You either love your business and care about it enough, or you don’t. It’s like a family member. You raise your business the way your raise a child. You invest in it, nurture it, and pay attention to it. Marketing is every bit as much a part of your business as invoicing. If not, you’re stunting its growth, and the opportunities don’t last forever. You can always begin, at any time, from where you are – and you can be successful, but the unique opportunities at each stage of business growth don’t really ever come back. Don’t stunt it – get involved or starve the marketing for your involvement – those are the choices. You see how, as with family, many people do the latter

Do people really offer up that litany of negative self-fulfilling prophesises? You bet. All the time. Constantly and continually. After all, how do you think we live with a decision not to succeed? Not to grow? We create an explanation, a new explanatory paradigm of why success wasn’t or isn’t possible. It helps us maintain the status quo, remaining unhealthy – personally or in our business – even if it’s not helpful. It’s how we comfort ourselves when we aren’t doing what is essential. It is how we fail successfully. We can only stand so much knowledge that it’s really us – that we are really our biggest problem and, more importantly, we are really our best avenue for success. Again, not touchy feely – these have been constructive, concrete examples and information. What you do with it, or whether you make the decisions necessary to go forward, are up to you.

This has been a candid, unshirking, delving into the reality of what holds us back in internet marketing. We hope it helps. We do have some sugar coating, actually, and we use a little of it most of the time. But sometimes, a tart apple with a little salt is better than another bowl of syrupy cobbler.

We’re Market Moose. Tart where it counts.

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