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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

1. Search Engine Results

The SEO value of videos, podcasts, and images are in the title, description, and tags. Properly optimized videos often rank highly for their targeted keywords on the search engines. Businesses take advantage of this to get lots of exposure.

2. Generating Leads and Traffic

From both the SEO and the social media value (sharing, commenting, subscribing), videos on Youtube can be a good medium for generating leads and traffic. Instead of focusing all your efforts on a web site alone, videos that offer advice, insight, analysis, training, explanations, etc. can actually help you generate leads. A lot of businesses use Youtube the way others use blogs.

3. Training and Instruction

Whether sustaining the growth of your business by implementing training for internal audiences, providing training for your client base, or simply making a case for all the things you say all the time anyway, videos can extend your business’ effectiveness and marketing, just as they do internally for large corporations.If you’re weighing the benefits of giving classes locally (a great marketing technique) vs. doing it online, what not record your local classes, and upload to Youtube. A lot of businesses do both.

4. Extending your Brand

Youtube can help you build your brand very effectively. Create a channel with your company name and logo and use video to explain your core values, your unique market differentiators, and explain where you add value. The number of business Youtube pages is growing exponentially.

5. Client Testimonials

Invite satisfied clients to upload their video testimonials, helping you build credibility and increasing your sales. Or ask key clients to let you film a brief testimonial, then splice them together with video editing software, to make a combined video. Most startups provide a variety of video types on Youtube – instruction, sales, and testimonials too.

6. Your own Infomercials

Why spend money on old-fashioned TV ads when, cost per value, you can do it on Youtube? Whatever product or service you’re offering, make a case for it using your own infomercial format. If Youtube is the new TV, you see the next logical decision, and this places advertising in the hands of everyone. But the rule of the thumb is be incredibly creative. Just an ad spot will get few views – but an interesting show that entertains, while positioning your service or product is a good sell.

7. Fun as Publicity

If you haven’t seen the Trunk Monkey videos, they’re worth your time. Humor is a great way to get attention. Create highly informative or funny videos and disseminate them using services like tubemogul. Humor can break through the “spam” barrier and giver your website more eyeballs, increase your popularity as the videos go viral.

8. Tutorials

Tutorials are a specific kind of training and instruction, so we list it separately. Provide clients step-by-step videos guides for things related to but not including your services and products. For instance, if you’re a real estate agent, explain how to stage a home. If you’re a landscaper, demonstrate the best times to water your lawn.

9. Your Talk Show

Like podcasting, you can do video podcasting, addressing issues close to the hearts and minds of your clients. If you find customers talking about a specific issue, take their side and add your two cents in an ongoing series addressing their concerns.

10. Product or Service Trailer

You’ve seen movie trailers. Product or service trailers utilize the trailer-style for a fast, quick and captivating presentation of your offerings. Think about what you’re doing for clients, and roll-out new products and services, before they launch, with “coming soon”.

Keep in mind that you can upload videos to Youtube, then embed them in your own web pages, occasionally changing them out for newer ones as you go. Youtube makes this easy by providing the correct code with various options for size, etc. It’s a great way to send clients from your web site to your Youtube page, increasing interaction and viral spreading of your marketing, just as it brings clients to your web site from your Youtube page and the branding you add to each video. Make sure all your videos  mention  your company name and web site address.

Advice: don’t agonize over the equipment and setup first. You’ll make some trial videos anyway. Focus on brainstorming creative ideas without criticism, and on narrowing down your central message into key bullets, your elevator pitch, and your market differentiators. Pair the two – your creative ideas with your market message, and make some videos. You can always redo them later, but getting the process started will give you fast experience with what works and what doesn’t.

In this video, Daniel DiGriz discusses the three primary things that search engines, like Google, want from your web site. These are also the things that make it most effective for internet marketing with site visitors.

Hi. I’m Daniel DiGriz, president of Market Moose. I’d like to talk with you about the three things that search engines are looking for in your website.

The first thing is original content. By “original,” we mean that it’s unique to your website. It doesn’t appear anywhere else on the Web. A lot of people think that it’s okay to lift content off of other sites and use that in their own sites. Sometimes, I’ll even see people make blog posts out of news reports that they found on The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal websites. The problem with this is that search engines are well aware that this happens. First, they detect the site that had that content the longest, or the first site that put it up, and they rank that site higher. After all, they’re copy-worthy. You borrowed their material. Second, they rank websites that have copied that material much lower. If your site consists largely of material that you have borrowed from elsewhere on the Web, you’re going to want to replace that with original content. So, the idea is for you as the site owner to contribute to the site’s content yourself, and to structure that content in such a way that it is effective for marketing and contains the key things that people need to make the decision to deal with you.

The second thing that search engines want is relevant content. By “relevant,” they mean the same things that consumers mean when they’re searching for material on the Web. If I’m a consumer and I want to find a mortgage broker in, say, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, what I’m going to do is type, “mortgage broker vancouver island bc.” If those words do not appear in the website that I’m looking for, the website is not going to appear in the search results, either. So, the idea is that the content you’re writing should be relevant to two things. First, it should be relevant to your industry. It should contain things like the types of services that you provide. Second, it should be relevant to your locale. No one goes to the Web and simply types in the words, “real estate agent.” If they do that, they’ll get real estate agents in New Mexico when they’re looking for real estate agents in North Carolina. Instead, they’re going to type in “real estate agent” or “realtor” and then a place name, such as the city and state. So, you want to make sure that the content that you are writing is highly localized (highly relevant, that is) to your locale, and also highly relevant to the services that you offer.

So, to recap: search engines want content that is original and content that is highly relevant.

Lastly, what Google and other search engines are looking for these days is content that is frequently updated or fresh. Back in the day when search engine optimization first took hold, it was all about simply being found and using techniques to locate your site, but there are a lot more websites now. Many of those websites – especially blogs and forums – are dynamic sites. They are updated all of the time, frequently changing and having additional content added to them. Search engines tend to rank those sites more highly these days. So, if you have the old-fashioned static site from, say, five or six years ago with about five pages – a homepage, a “contact us” page, an “about us” page, and a couple of others – then that site is far less likely to be found than any of your competitors that have a dynamic site. A dynamic site is one in which you are updating the content frequently. By “frequently,” I don’t mean once every six months. I mean more like three times a week. What I tell people is, “If you’ll spend five minutes daily or ten minutes every other day doing a 100-word update to your site, you are far more likely to get traffic.” If that update is relevant and original, it will make your website more attractive to search engines than your competitors’ static websites which haven’t changed in months. That’s why most websites these days have a blog component. Business websites, for example, have really launched into blogging.

To summarize, the three things that search engines want are original or unique content, content that is highly relevant from a search engine and a searcher’s standpoint, and also content that is frequently and freshly updated. Keep these things in mind, and your site will dominate your competitors’ sites in your particular market.

Thanks very much. This is Daniel DiGriz once again from Market Moose Internet Marketing.

It’s one thing to borrow corporate processes, but there are some real perils in borrowing corporate style. Web sites are a prime example. So often, web design for small business revolves around trying to look like a corporate site. Everything bland, everything under one brand, very little connectivity, most of the effort is spent on trying to limit the footprint, control the visitor, and keep everything under one roof. Disaster for small business. A better model is Web 2.0 startups. Startup businesses who are doing on the web what the corporate committees are afraid to, are doing it quite successfully, and are taking a huge chunk out of corporate market share.

Corporate web sites try to brand everything themselves, and omit anything that would require sharing space or credit. They pay extra to put their own name on other people’s services.
Web 2.0 startup web sites collaborate with lots of brands, giving that collaboration prominence. When you see “we integrate with Harvest, Outright, and Shoeboxed” you’re in a Web 2.0 environment.

Corporations focus on the web as a medium for transactions. A virtual cash register or billboard. They are slow to catch on to social media, blogging, and other forms of interactivity. Most sites still provide only a contact page. Or if there’s more, they make it secondary. Their first entrance into social media is usually like their site content – a form of advertising, which most people treat a lot like spam.
Web 2.0 startups make staying in their orbit primary. Social media links are prominent. The focus is on brand loyalty by joyous participation. They cultivate their “tribe” by adding value constantly – blogging free information, insights, and advice – instead of making everything a sales pitch.

Corporate sites make everything clean, pristine, and formal. The better ones have a real-ish mascot person (Progressive’s girl, Subway’s guy). But the interaction that would actually come with real people is pushed to the back.
Web 2.0 sites give you some genuine human scruff. There’s plain talk, photos of real people, and your comments are often part of the front page. They not only say they want feedback, they often feature tough questions from clients.

Corporate web sites take feedback from a contact form. In response, you get a form letter, as the first try.
Web 2.0 web sites make feedback part of the site itself. They include a forum, or invite public blog comments, and usually the response is personal – from either a ranking employee or a captain or guide among dedicated fans invited to help newbies along.

Corporations hire a firm to get research on what you think, want, and will buy.
Web 2.0 startups crowdsource their ideas. They ask you what you right on the site, and in external social mediums like Twitter.

Corporate web sites put their services above everything. The focus is top down. ‘Here is what we offer. Which one do you want?’ The landing page is mostly static. It’s as though social interaction were an afterthought. The equivalent is that person we all know who shakes hands and then asks who is your insurance carrier.
Web 2.0 web sites include generous dynamic content on their landing page, which not only gives them better search engine optimization (SEO), it seems like someone is home. Services don’t take a back seat, but the site is also not just an ad sheet.

Corporations are trying to extend their brand into social media (like Facebook and Twitter), but they really don’t get it. Mostly, contacts revolve around their web site, and their service or product offerings.
Web 2.0 startups start out in social media first, often while the web site is under construction. They often build a community *before* offering products or services. Their brand is not dependent on the web site. The site becomes the central hub of their marketing, but not the sum of it.

Comparisons are plentiful, but the point is this: Anyone can throw up a corporate-style web site. There’s actually a formula – just like there is for most corporate processes. A lot of research has gone into it. Some of it’s right, and some of it used to be right, but hasn’t been in what, for the web, is a long time. You do need the basics – a Contact Us page, an About Us page, a Privacy Statement, some Terms of Service (TOS) for online participation. But merely duplicating the corporate footprint and slapping a blog and some social media icons on top of it, does not make you effective in a web 2.0 world. What does, actually, is rethinking your interactions with prospects so that you can attract new types of clients to build your tribe (again, referencing Seth Godin’s book Tribes) and compensate for client turnover.

In other words, it’s not all about the web site, and it’s not about tossing up the right pages, which can be done in a few hours. It’s about completely re-envisioning how relationships with consumers are built. That’s what web 2.0 means for small business. It means you can’t just copy anymore, because consumers have gotten smarter than that. It means you can’t just build it and expect that they will come. It means, more than anything else, that you’ve got to be involved. Small businesses that won’t hear that won’t be successful in this medium, the new web, the internet market not as it will be, but as it has already become.

So next time you’re looking at web sites to imitate, whether it’s corporate ones or your competitors, stop. Instead, look for people to imitate. That’s the meaning of the new web, also. The web site doesn’t mean half a damn, if you’re not doing what the successful people are doing. Even if you just duplicate some web 2.0 site, it doesn’t mean it will be successful for you. And not because your industry is different, or your clients are special. It’s because copying doesn’t work anymore – not the way it once did. What good is throwing up a blog if you’re not going to do with it what businesses who have been successful with blogging are doing with theirs? What good is having a new logo and a presence on Facebook, if you’re just going to camp there and wait for people to find you – that’s not what successful web 2.0 businesses are doing with their logo and facebook account.

You’re going to need a marketing plan – an approach that goes beyond merely acquiring widgets to add to your web site. It may be an unpleasant truth to businesses that aren’t prepared to change, both how they do marketing, and some internal processes accordingly, which is what consumers influenced by web 2.0, whether they realize they have been or not, will require. If cultural change is not part of your small business culture, then you have something else to learn from corporations. It’s not how to build a web site. Those guys are still back in the 90s on that one. But what corporations often have down, or at least pay good lipservice to, is the need for change management as a routine part of the business. The need to adapt as the public changes. One can easily find a lot of small businesses, especially single-owner shops that, in the face of a changing outside world, just keep their heads down and keep plowing away with all the more vigour at the same old thing. And with varying degrees of success. You often get something for working twice as hard – it’s just that it’s not usually twice as much success.

If you don’t know much about how to approach the new web, the new consumer, and what to do about your internet marketing, that’s when you need an internet marketing consultant. I’m really not trying to tout our services. There are lots of qualified people. We’re here, of course, but our approach is to keep giving away insights, advice, and information, for free, and we figure those people who should become our clients will be. If we take care of everyone, some, by offering tips, tricks, and not shirking on the substance, people will take care of us, too. That’s how we do web 2.0. Now, if you’ve read this far, you’ve got to ask yourself how you are doing it. And if you represent a corporation, you already got this information from those firms you hire to give it to you. Whether you heard it or not, well – that’s really the question.

Telling it like it is. Market Moose.

A lot of people wonder whether they should even have personal photos on their site. If your pets look better than you do, should you really have personal photos at all? Should you hire a model?

Sites with no personal photos look dead. So yeah, you need photography with actual human beings in it, if you want a response out of the 50% of visitors who are socially motivated. Whether it’s you, clients, or just guys that look good in their Dockers, you need something – and make sure it’s on the landing page, at a minimum.

Most people look decent in decent clothes and with a smile. No need to hire models. I’ve been building business web sites for ages, and I have yet to see someone so hideous that a coat and tie, or some professional attire, and a genuine smile makes a bad photo.

Dress like your clients. Here’s a tip – if you get your hands dirty for a living, but your clients work in an office, put on office attire. The reverse is true too – just ask every politician that speaks at an AFL-CIO rally. If you work in an office and your clients get dirty for a living, ditch the tie and put on a blue collar. Maybe even a hardhat, or hold a clipboard. Dress like your audience.

Use a flat background. Whether you get portraits made, or are just taking staff photos outside your building, get some photos in front of a flat background of only one color. It can be a good idea to get in a skyline or something, but a background that’s too busy distracts from your other graphics and site colors,  like your  logo. And try to avoid shadows! Photos with flat backgrounds and no shadows can be easily photoshopped for various uses, cutting out the background without losing part of your hair.

Get professional portraits. Eventually, you’re going to need these. Your photo is part of your brand. It’ll be your avatar in places where you aren’t using a logo – like maybe Twitter or Facebook. It’ll be your personal motif you add to e-mail newsletters and web sites. Pay a photographer and tell him you don’t want to buy any prints at all. Just the disk, please. Why scan photos in, reducing their quality, when you can start out digital? No one wants print versions for professional work. Go digital, and get it done in the right light, with lots of different poses, so  you can take them home and use different ones for different purposes. Make sure you’re leaving with at least a 2-3 good images that you like on that disk. When people listen to what you say, they are also looking at how you look. If you’re in a hurry and need it tomorrow, CVS and Walgreens do on the spot passport photos. Tell them you want a plain background and maybe an angle shot at your face instead of straight on, to avoid the mugshot look.

Wear the glasses sometimes. If you wear glasses, get photos with and without. And ask professionals in your target audience for their opinion on your final pics. Personally, I don’t like having my glasses on in my photos, but they do make me look smarter and also more approachable. Without them, I’m more like an alley cat. With them, I’m like a well-heeled Russian blue. So, I wear them for pro pics.

Using models isn’t wrong. You may want some professionally licensed model photography for your site. Don’t swipe it off the net, or you’ll regret it later. If you use it, pay for the right licensing first. The plain truth is that about 10% of the population looks better to 90% of the population than 90% of us do to each other.  If you’re looking for people who look truly happy, fit, excited, beautiful, and involved in whatever you’re selling, that’s exactly what models do. And small businesses should take a cue from the big guys in this regard – commercials, corporate sites (often doing many things wrong, they do this part right), product catalogues – these all use models for a reason.

Invite everyone who works with you. The front person needs separate photos, but staff photos are quite effective for marketing and company image, also. Whether your people are employees, contractors, colleagues you share work with, or just a couple of family members who join you part time, and maybe a temp from an agency, invite them to do staff photos for your web site, and individual photos and bios for staff profiles.

Get permission. If you use staff photos, get a release form signed for use of their photo on the internet. And not the old-fashioned model release forms that don’t have clauses for internet use. Get one that’s up to date, with the web in mind. I won’t post mine here, because I’m not a legal expert and not offering legal advice. But if you want a copy, and you’re already a client, feel free to request it. I’ll share it as a “this is what I’m doing” – not as a “here’s what you need”. Consult an attorney – that’s what they’re there for – to keep you from meeting other people’s attorneys.

Resize and crop those darned things! The biggest issue, literally, we see with photos provided by our clients is that they’re the size of a wall. Lower the darned resolution on that camera to the smallest it’ll do. Photos for the web need to be fast-loading. Windows picture viewer fakes it, by showing you the size you expect, but that’s not the real size. Use something like irfanview (and tip the man for using his software – it’s worth it) to see the *real* size. If you’re taking pics at maximum resolution with you’re camera, you’ll probably see an eyeball filling your monitor. Yes, that’s how big it actually is. You can use the same software to resize your existing photos to something reasonable, like 400px width. Even if you *display* the photo at smaller width on your site, it’s loading the entire photo every time someone loads the page, slowing down your site, chewing up  your web space and bandwidth, and all for nought. Don’t waste the net, or your money, or your visitors’ time. Shrink those photos for the web. And crop out the needless backgrounds. If there’s a table edge in one corner, use the same software to crop it. Rule of thumb – show what’s relevant – omit what’s not.

Don’t make your business site a personal home page. A lot of people want to put photos of their cats, their favorite vehicles, or their kids on their business web sites. As someone who does internet marketing, I walk gently here, unless I think the client is open to advice. But my general advice is, unless you’re a micro-business and family or pets or your vehicles are part of your brand, don’t. There’s a difference between a personal home page, which has your favorite songs, colors, etc. and a business site. The former is what Myspace is for. It’s free – use it. Better yet, if you’re in business, use Facebook for that. You’ll get more value. Your business site needs to appeal to the model visitors that constitute your prospect and client demographics. And they’re looking for specific kinds of content. If you don’t know what to put on your site, that’s what an internet marketing consultant is for. We’re happy to help, or there are others out there.

That’s it. Straight, no-nonsense advice on using your photos on your web site. Let us know if you think of something we’ve skipped. We’re always accumulating new ideas and insights as well. Have fun. I can hear those digital cameras clicking away already.

1. Creating Live Updates on Product or Service Launches: A great way to let the world know about a product’s progress, or a new service as you are building it, is tweeting about it. Small business owners can consistently post their challenges, as they encounter them, give progress reports, and ask people for input. The latter is called crowdsourcing, and it’s a great way to tap the public for advice, rather than just build it and hope for a positive response.

2. Get Quick Feedback: Again, crowdsourcing. One of the many reasons why some product launches fail is because of a lack of feedback from the intended customers. Who knows better about Jimmy Choo shoes or makeup than women? So, if you want decent feedback on your products’ satisfaction or non-satisfaction, you need the customers to consistently give you feedback. Email correspondence might do it, but nothing is better than just scrolling through a list of real time responses that you can reference and attend to immediately.

3. Posting Recent Rates and Costs: In certain businesses, the rates and prices of services, products and commodities vary on a daily basis. For instance, a stock broking company can consistently give a stream of real time estimates and prices of each company’s stock prices, a mortgage broker can easily post daily rates and so on.

4. Product or service development research: Twitter accounts with large numbers of followers are often a potential source of information when developing new products or services. Sometimes, a company can just take a look at the frequently asked questions to determine which problems are recurrent and then provide a solution for that problem. It’s not just about posting tweets – it’s also about reading them.

5. Networking: You can build or develop a whole network of likeminded individuals, make new contacts, share ideas and generally, make more profits from your partnerships. If you’re not a big believer in networking in general, you won’t ever relate to social media. In some ways, social media is really the new Rotary Club, coffee hour, or social organization. Where is everyone when you go those, now? They’re in social media.

6. Attract More Clients: Things that happen on twitter often spread like wildfire. Businesses can create a contest, a giveaway, a virtual event, and spread the word via Twitter. Not only will it catch the attention of the relevant people, it will also bring in more clients and give more exposure.

7. Upcoming Live Events and Conferences: Besides virtual events, upcoming live attendance events and conferences can be posted on Twitter, so prospects can easily track them and share with others. There can be a countdown timer embedded on the profile or just consistent tweeting of the countdown date.

8. Building a Brand Presence: Twitter is great for building a brand presence online, which is important even for (if not especially for) brick and mortar businesses. Building a brand can be as easy as simply tweeting useful free information and following a few new people every day. When the content is genuine and informative, followership occurs naturally. Remember, if you spam everyone with requests for business, people will drop you.

9. Fun: A lot of people come from the “what happens in my off time is MINE” mentality, but as small businesses grow, increasingly you have less time that’s really just “yours”. You become embedded in your business, like an icon or a mascot – you become your brand. There’s nothing wrong with posting the movie your team is attending, or jokes about yourself as the owner, or even just jokes about your business. You could even create a mythical mascot (if you’re a gym, Jumpy the Fitness Mouse) and track his comings and goings, foibles and failures, like an ongoing reality program. Make no mistake, fun sells.

10. Blog: If you’re blogging, share links to your blog posts, with brief excerpts, on your Twitter account.  Why shouldn’t your social media be integrated? It’s your brand. Your blog postings are events too. Just a rule of thumb – don’t tweet more than once a day on the average – these can flood someone’s Twitter page – give someone else a chance, and you’re more likely to be followed and remain followed.

1. Posting Coupons and Discounts: Many businesses lose customers by not publicising their discounts and coupons. Companies can post up package deals, discounts, coupon codes on their Facebook wall and put a limit on how many people can have access to it. For example, giving out a coupon or discount code to only 50 people will create a frenzy and a mad rush for products.

2. Keep Customers in your Orbit: A business can easily have the customers lurking on their page for more offers. As in the above example, businesses can post the codes randomly once a week. For example, coupon codes can be posted Monday this week, and Thursday next week. This keeps customers interested.

3. Release Product Excerpts or Post Beta Testers Notice: Products like software often needs beta testers. What better way to connect with the market other than through Facebook. Most times, customers, and fans can be contacted to beta test a product and report on their usage. Facebook is an excellent place to locate such people.

4. Networking and Connecting: There are experts in very field. Via Facebook, a company can connect with an authority in its niche and ask him to become a guest blogger and update the status on their wall. This method is often timely and more effective when a crucial topic is discussed or when there is a new development in the industry or niche.

5. Building Clientele or Customer Base
A stream of new clients and customers can be gotten from Facebook if a company maintains a consistent rapport with its fan base. Group members or friends can easily tweet or email a really good blog post updated on Facebook to their friends leading to more leads and customers.

6. Releasing Viral Reports: Informative reports can be easily released and can go viral when posted on Facebook. Companies can release book excerpts, videos, podcasts and so on to create more awareness, build or strengthen the brand and get new buyers.

7. Post Business Updates: Companies can post more business updates on the wall, thus letting customers and shareholders in on recent happenings in the company and creating an impression of transparency or openness.

8. Combine With Other Social Media Tools: Facebook can be combined with other media tools to create a synergy and more exposure. For instance, questions asked and issues on myspace can be answered and addressed through a blog post which is then updated on a company’s Facebook wall.

9. Buy Facebook Ads: Companies can increase their visibility and build their brands by buying Facebook ads.

10. Resident Expert: There’s nothing quite so important as consistency, and giving away free info, advice, and insights is a way to not only have sustainable Facebook activity and attract followers, but it avoids the ‘all I have to say is buy my service’ approach which just gets you marginalized. If you were Ted Koppel, Andy Rooney, and Rush Limbaugh, how would you talk about your industry or locale in Facebook?

Are you passing up simple opportunities for marketing? Too busy? There’s no excuse when it comes to passive marketing.

Are you including a link to your web site, facebook page, and twitter profile in your e-mail footer? Why not? Every e-mail software in existence lets you add an automated footer or tagline. Every time you send an e-mail, it should be automatic. You should be promoting your business, your blog, and your latest activity (which is where social media like facebook and twitter come in). People go out and spend money on every scam automated marketing technique, and don’t do the free things that really do work, that are right there in arms reach!

What about your voice mail? Does it just say hold on a minute, or leave a message, or here listen to America singing something confusing like “Horse with No Name”? What about “Hey, while you’re waiting, or before you hang up and I get a click in my voicemail, our web site address is ___. We take orders online 24/7. You can see what we’re doing by connecting with us on facebook or twitter. Add us…” (chances are, they’re already logged in to one of those, along with half of the country).

Why *wouldn’t* you use passive marketing to extend the reach, the opportunities, and the services of your business, let alone give clients more ways to connect with you? Stubborn old-fashionness? Look the world was going to change 40 years ago, too. Remember typewriters? You either reach the market as it is now, or you kick back to re-runs of Mayberry RFD (which is available in streaming video online, by the way).

Not Technical Doesn’t Matter: Not technical? So? Look, a typewriter and a fax machine are a lot harder to use than twitter or finding the button to add a footer to your e-mails. Figured out your VCR yet? You probably have a DVD player now, which is much simpler, right? But if you’re over 40, you’ve used a VCR. If you can set the clock on the VCR,  you can figure out how to connect with people on your Facebook page.

Your Web Site Coma: That brings us to one more topic. Your web site. One of our cartoons on the site is about someone complaining that visitors are landing on his website. “Why is that a problem?” his friend asks. “Because my web site is chasing away my visitors”, he says. You should have your web site on all your literature – flyers, doorhangers, company manuals, promotional books and PDFs, cookbooks if you sell them, whatever. And it should be in all your electronic communications. Get this now:

Your Brand: One simple rule of branding is first and foremost: brand everything. There’s more you can learn, but that alone is pretty important.

But if you never touch your site, don’t care about it, don’t even know if it’s broken or up and running, if the content’s out of date, old phone numbers and e-mails, or just stale, stale, stale — ask yourself — you don’t care, so why should anyone else? What, because it’s a web site? Would you keeping hanging the same flyer on the same door for the next five years? If not, because it’s silly, why does your web site have the same content it always did? If you’re biased toward it, just because it’s technology, you’re passing up business, and doing it because you’ve told yourself you don’t like these newfangled keyboards – you prefer typewriters. You don’t want to set the clock on your VCR, you prefer 8mm projectors and slide carousels. It’s just too complicated. Look, we’re grownups, we’ve learned far more complex things in our lives, so what is it really? Isn’t it that it’s just work, and we feel a little more tired today than we did yesterday?

The New Reality: OK, so if it’s something like that, then there’s what you have to deal with. Business is like this – you get into it, including the changes, or you get out. Or maybe it’s that you don’t believe? People laughed at twitter when it came out. Now a lot of us get our mortgage rate updates there. People said Facebook was for useless banter among buddies (we hear that word “useless” a lot, and it’s almost always applied to something that’s incredibly useful – ask yourself why – huh? ask.). Now 75% of all real estate agents are in Facebook -wait – that was last year – it has grown since then! Maybe that’s not your market, but your market is there, and going in droves. You either go where the market goes, or I can send you that link to Mayberry RFD. Opie is still as hilarious as ever. But you know what I mean.

So now, brand your stuff. Not just with your logo – that’s old fashioned thinking. Logos were created in the days when you started a business by going to the stationary store. When’s the last time you needed stationary? Brand with your links. Brand with your connections. Brand with the ability to interact with you. That’s modern branding, and it’s not a passing fad. Myspace started 4 years ago. If you’re in the music business, and you’re not in Myspace, you’re nobody. Nobody. Facebook stared in 2008 and it’s not getting smaller or dying down. People no longer ask, “are you in facebook”. That lasted about a year. Now what you hear is, “what’s your facebook id?” It’s just assumed. If you’re not there, you’re not part of the conversation – and while it’s easy to say we don’t care about that – here’s a better way to put it – if you’re not there, you’re not part of the market. Word of mouth? The new word of mouth is in Facebook. That’s the new Rotary Club and corporate golf game. Not being in Facebook today is like not having a toll-free number 6 years ago, before nationwide long-distance was free on everyone’s GSM cell phones. You were just throwing away business. Guess what’s waiting for you? Your company ID in facebook. Haven’t claimed it yet? Someone’s going to. They’re just waiting for you to go out of business. Go get it – it’s not like it’s not free.

In summary, you want to use your passive marketing opportunities, because they’re free, easy, and take almost no effort. You could trip over them, because they’re right in front of you. You want your marketing to be fresh. If your web sites hasn’t changed recently, you’ve been serving the same meatloaf every night for a month. I don’t care if it is the best in the world, now everyone is eating at the neighbor’s house. And lastly, if you’re ignoring social media (facebook, twitter, linkedin, and even youtube) because you don’t know how to do it, or don’t want to learn, you might as well hang a sign over your business that says “founded a century ago, and still working there”. You’re missing everyone under 50. OK, not everyone, but everyone that’s spending any money. More or less. So wasn’t this article about passive marketing? Yeah, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t bring active marketing into it, because you need to know what you’re missing in both realms, and in case this is the only article you read, we had to take our shot at talking about it.

Market Moose – handing out marketing reality, before it’s too late!

What’s really different about your business? It’s not uncommon to hear a plumber say “I do everything” or a lanscaper to say “I do the same things as every other landscaper”. If that’s so, your marketing has either come to an abrupt end – pack it up and go home – you’ll have to survive without it – or it’s just beginning because, starting from nothing is different is a great way to *begin* your marketing.

First, if it’s really true that you’re not doing anything any differently than anyone else in your field, then why should anyone pick you over anyone else? Sometimes the answer is, “I don’t know. You’re the marketing guy, you tell me.” All right, I will. There isn’t any reason. There isn’t any reason, and mere SEO isn’t going to help you. All those SEO gurus out there selling you on how you’ll be first? No you won’t – the guy who is different will get more business than you.

Second, often it’s just a lack of imagination. Someone once said, “all real estate appraisers do the same thing.” Really? Are you sure? I’ve dealt with a ton of them, and I can tell you that is absolutely not true. Your competitors are coming up with unique ways to add value all the time, because that’s how they’re getting clients that you are not. Some people guarantee a response to all queries within 6 hours. Some guarantee one-day turnaround on any drive-by appraisal. Some include satellite photos with every report. Some send all reports by both PDF and mail. Some include a 3D sketch. It’s not that hard. Useless, you say? Really? Their clients don’t think so.

You should get a copy of The Purple Cow by Seth Godin. And if you can’t take advice on learning something new, frankly, you don’t deserve new clients, so I feel free to recommend books here. Seth will give you a lot of case histories of companies that did unusual things that didn’t even necessarily add tangible value. Some added perceived value, some added a perk, some added just something to get attention. That’s the purple cow. It works, folks. It really does.

In a related profession, Home Inspector, there are a lot of people who focus on just the report. “What?” they ask. “Should I use a bigger font?” Maybe. I’ve known one professional whose secret was the quality of the deliverable. It was full color, highly illustrated, graphic bullets, and clean, clear headers, etc. Clients gave him referral business by showing off the quality of his reports vs. his competitors. So did it make a difference? Hell yeah! What about the inspector that includes infrared imagery? “Silly gadgetry,” I’ve heard some grumble. So? So freaking what? He’s being silly all the way to the bank, while you’re just clowning around trying to pay for more directory listings. It makes him stand out. It makes him rock in the eyes of the people shelling out cash for his work. So even if he spends $750 on the tool and doesn’t charge a dime more for his reports, how much is one more referral source worth to you? If you’re in his business, it had better be worth more than that or you’re seriously underpaid.

Third, market differentiators aren’t horse manure. They’re actions. Put verbs on them. If it doesn’t come with an “I include,” “I deliver”, “I provide,” it’s not a market differentiator. People aren’t buying more talk, they’re buying action. If your market differentiators run something like this, “we have the experience, the quality, to deliver in an ethical, full-service environment… blah blah blah” then yeah, you’re just like everybody else. You’ve got to find your purple cow. Even if it’s just a professionally produced report cover, or something. But the best market differentiators are ones that you can describe – on your web site, in your e-mail tagline, in your voice mail (you *are* using those for marketing, aren’t you?). The best differentiators are ones that, even if a client says “I don’t need that.” you can respond with a warm smile, “That’s OK. It’s just one of the little premium extras we like to provide our clients at no extra cost.” Now that’s kick-ass marketing!

So do it now. Sit down and create three things you do differently that the client can see. If you get 2, give yourself a B. If you got none, then it’s time to decide on what they’re going to be. You can’t sell boredom, sameness, blandness, and ‘the usual’ in restaurants. Even McDonalds is always trying to add something new. You can’t sell “our cars have indistinct, non-descript lines, ordinary motors, suspensions, and wheels” unless you’re also saying (ahem… Kia) that you’re kicking in a 10year warranty, a super low price, and a refund program. And if you wouldn’t buy it, why would anyone else? Get on it! Go sit down in a cafe, send the waitress away to avoid interruption, and write down whatever comes to mind in a notebook. It may quite possibly be the best hour you’ll ever spend on your marketing. And we’re here, not to tout ourselves, but if you need consulting time to help nail some of this down, we can do that. We succeed for one reason – well, two – we’ll tell you the truth rather than sell you a false instant fix – and our only goal is your success. If we think about that, and that alone, people will take care of us. This might give you a hint at some of our marketing differentiators.

Market Moose – Difference is Devastating

The change is this: not every company needs or wants a logo. Believe it or not, it’s not automatically one of the signs of professionalism anymore. What a lot of companies do instead is get a graphic header for their site that contains their company name, but also other information, and is graphically rich or stylistically significant. Neither way is right or wrong. There are still plenty of logos being made. It’s a matter of direction, taste, preference.

The main value of a logo is branding. You can brand everything from your facebook and twitter accounts to your e-mail campaigns to print materials.The consistency is a marketing technique that starts building brand trust and can help business growth.

The main value of a web site header is memory. If it’s catching enough, people land on your site and it immediately visually imprints in their mind. So if they’re looking at several sites (from search engines), or they are making a decision to act later, arresting colors or catching graphics tend to stick in their remembrance, and they tend to look to come back to the same site again, which can often be what turns the hit into a contact.

Other types of graphics that can be relevant these days are anything from avatars (little symbols that represent you when you comment on a blog site) to custom-designed Twitter and Facebook icons for your site. It’s a fun time for graphic design!

In this video, Daniel DiGriz explains the five things that should appear on the home page of every small business web site for successful internet marketing.

Hi. I’m Daniel DiGriz, president of Market Moose Internet Marketing. What I’d like to talk with you about today are the five things that need to be on every small business website’s homepage.

Your homepage is probably the single most important page on your website. By your homepage, I mean your landing page. A lot of people confuse those terms (“homepage” and “website”). Your homepage is the first place on your website that new visitors land when we type in your dot-com.

Your homepage needs to have, at a minimum, five things. Your homepage needs to say who you are, what you do, where you do it, why choose you, and what to do next. I know that today it’s very important to keep your website from being cluttered, but, at the same time, if you do not at least have these five things, you’re losing visitors because they don’t have sufficient information to make a decision to call you, contact you, or purchase from you on the first page without clicking anything. Given an atmosphere where people are pulling up multiple sites on search engines and looking at them, that’s what you need to do: grab them and capture them on the first page – your homepage.

“Who you are” is a summary of who you are as a company. It is not just your brand name or your company name. I don’t mean necessarily how long you’ve been in business or your life story. What it needs to cover are the basics that I need to know: a profile of your company. For example, “I’m a real estate agent who covers the San Francisco area and deals primarily in condos and single-family properties.” That’s a “who you are.” If you want, you can add to that a couple of things like how long you’ve been in business, but I wouldn’t make it a history lesson. 100 words is normal.

The second thing that you need is “what you do.” Obviously, if you’re a product-driven website, this is going to be a little different than it would be for a service-based organization. Product-driven websites are going to focus on what they’re selling. A service-based organization is going to focus on their services. It’s very important to get a complete list of your services into this part of your homepage. I realize that this is going to be a challenge because you may have a lot of services that you offer. So, the goal is to get those services listed that you think people are going to search for in search engines. For instance, if you’re in a marketing company like me, “search engine optimization” or “SEO” needs to be a part of it. If you’re a real estate appraiser, what type of appraisals do you do? It’s not enough to say, “We do all types of appraisals.” That’s a summary, but no one goes to Google and types in, “Show me all types of appraisals.” They might type in, “divorce appraisal,” “litigation appraisal” or “tax assessment appeal appraisal.” So, if those terms are not in your website – and, specifically, if they’re not in your homepage – the chances of you coming up in those searches are relatively slim. You’re not going to appear very high up in those search results.

Next is “where you do it.” If you’re an Internet marketing company like me that deals globally, then it’s enough to say, “We deal with everyone. We work all over the world.” You may want to instead focus on the industries that you cover. For example, “We handle real estate clients, primarily,” or “attorneys and medical practices.” Or, say that you deal with everyone but list all of the people that you deal with: “A lot of our clients include real estate appraisers and medical practices.” But if you were a real estate appraiser, for instance, then you would want to list all of the counties and towns that you cover.

Just to give you an example from real estate appraisal, a lot of appraisers are used to the real estate industry where mortgage brokers will search for them under the county: “We cover Orange County.” But what about all of the towns that are in Orange County? The homeowners and attorneys out there are more likely to go to Google and simply type in a town name. If we’re looking for an appraiser in Oceanside, California, we’ll type in “appraiser oceanside ca.” You want to make sure that phrases like “oceanside” and “ca” are in your website. So, make sure that you list the full gamut of place names that you cover. If you’re a medical practice and you work in a metro area like Oklahoma City, for instance, make sure that you list things like, “We serve all of Oklahoma City and surrounding areas including Moore, Norman, Del City, Midwest City,” etc. That way, you’re getting all of those searches as well.

The next thing is “why choose you.” This is where you list your market differentiators. These are the things that make you unique and different as a business. They are the different things that you do to add value. Don’t fill this area with things like, “We’re reliable. We have integrity. We’re honest. We’re experts.” Everybody says that stuff. That’s not a market differentiator. No one searches for that stuff, either, so it’s really a waste of space. Remember that your homepage is a marketing instrument. Your goal is to get clients. So, how do you convert contacts into clients? It’s one thing to get a gazillion hits. It’s another thing for those hits to turn into meaningful contacts that contact you versus the other two results that they’ve pulled up in a search engine on the average. Market differentiators are verbs. They’re the things that you actually do that are different than everyone else in your field.

To use real estate appraisers again for an example, I’ve had real estate appraisers tell me that all real estate appraisers do the same thing. You might just as easily hear this about divorce attorneys or psychologists, right? But it’s not true. Some real estate appraisers put satellite photos in there. That may not be something that’s valuable to you, but the perceived value to your client makes it a market differentiator. So, when you deliver a report that has a satellite photo, you’re adding value. Make sure that that is listed on the front page of your website, on your homepage, under “what we do differently,” “how we’re different” or “why you should choose us.”

So, again, market differentiators are verbs. These are the things that you’re willing to do differently, such as guarantee 24-hour response time, or “All reports delivered in triplicate: one by back-up copy sent by mail,” or something like that. “We give you a thumb drive that contains all photos taken on the property – even those not used in the report,” etc.

The last thing is “what to do next.” A lot of people shortchange themselves on this. They have an e-mail address, they have a phone number, and that’s not enough. What you need to do is give the client or the visitor lots of options. Maybe you order online. You fax, you e-mail, but you can also fill out a contact form or a lead capture form on the site. One of the reasons to have a form in this part of your homepage is – think about it like this. It’s the middle of the night. I know that if I call you, I’m going to get voice mail or an answering machine or a service. I’m probably not going to get you. But, this is when I’m researching. I’m home, I’m done with my workday, and I need to find something for the next day. Also, I may not want to click on my e-mail software. I may not want to click on an e-mail address and have it open Outlook which might take me five minutes on an older computer. Instead, if you provide a form, all I have to do is type in my name and e-mail address, and ask you my question. You, the website owner, are much more likely to get a contact off of that than the other guys who force me to open up e-mail and compose something.

So, consider the convenience of your client and how easy it is for him to contact you. Offer lots of ways to do it. Some people are going to want to e-mail. Some are going to want to call. Some are going to want to order online immediately. Give them all of the ways that they can contact you at this point – “what to do next.” Give them options.

That’s it. Those are the five things that should be on every homepage.

This is Daniel DiGriz from Market Moose Internet Marketing.

In this video, Daniel DiGriz explains Web 2.0 internet marketing. Touching on social media, blogging, and how business sites remain competitive in a Web 2.0 environment, Daniel presents the information clearly and concisely.

Hi. My name is Daniel DiGriz. I’m president of Market Moose Internet Marketing. I’d like to talk for a minute about the new social marketing or the new Internet marketing versus the old-fashioned marketing that we’re all used to. I think it’s best that we talk a little bit about what has changed.

In the past, marketing and advertising were largely confused. Marketing was something that you did to try to bring people in to try to buy the product or the service that you were offering. Now, of course, we all want that. If we’re running a small business or a medium-sized business, that’s ultimately our bottom line or our goal. But the way that we go about it has really had to change.

Just take Twitter and Facebook, for instance. Twitter and Facebook are now burgeoning sources of business revenue for small and medium businesses, as is social media in general. But it doesn’t work by simply going in and spamming everyone. We’ve all been through the era when small businesses came out on the Web, and we started filling up our inboxes with spam. We have developed pretty sophisticated ways to ignore that stuff. Facebook and Twitter are much the same way. If you want to alienate Facebook and Twitter audiences, just keep posting over and over how much you’d like their business, what your prices are, and “please buy my services today.” That just doesn’t work.

So, what’s effective in social media and in Internet marketing? In social media, what’s effective is giving away value or adding value at no charge. Believe it or not, it’s counter-intuitive. Instead of charging for your information, your insight, your analysis, your understanding, and your expertise, you give it away. The difference between that and advertising is that this new marketing allows you to build a tribe, an audience, a group of people that stay within your orbit. You sort of earn the right to attract that business. You earn the status of resident expert in these venues. You draw clientele off of that.

Let me give you an example from traditional marketing. In the old days, we all probably knew some individual in our lives who was “the friendliest person that you ever met.” No one had a bad thing to say about them. Oftentimes, he or she was an insurance agent. I always knew an insurance agent in every town in which I’ve lived that was just wonderful with people. This person shook your hand, brought you soup when you were sick, called you on holidays and sent you cards. The person usually didn’t have a hard sell. They didn’t go around saying, “I really need you to sign up for a policy. Don’t you want to sign here? Please buy my stuff.” Instead, they achieved the status of the person that everyone likes, the person with expertise. So, when we felt that we needed to protect our families better, who do you think that we turned to? Do you think that those guys really had trouble getting clients and growing their businesses? The answer is no. Well, that hasn’t changed a lot. It’s just changed venues.

So, again, marketing is not advertising. Marketing, in some ways, is what it always has been. It’s just that a lot of professional marketers were engaged in advertising, and so, sometimes we think that’s what it is.

Now, marketing has been returned to the hands of you and me and the ordinary small business person in venues like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. A lot people think, “Gee, I’m a small business – do I really need a blog?” Of course you do. You need a blog because part of adding value to your community is giving back your information, sharing your insight, providing answers to commonly asked questions, clarifying and correcting frequent misconceptions, talking about little-used services that actually benefit the public and why they’re there, but not necessarily constantly badgering people with a price sheet and an invitation to buy.

Make your presence known by contributing something to the community. You’ll build your tribe. You’ll grow your orbit. Your business will grow, and you’ll attract clients. Keep in mind that that is the new marketing. That’s the meaning, really, behind Twitter, Facebook, blogging, and all of the new social media. After that, it’s just about finding your own particular direction for growing your brand.

This is Daniel DiGriz, Market Moose Internet Marketing. Hope to hear from you soon. Have a great day!

Your site is the hub, the centerpiece, in your internet marketing plan. If you’re wondering whether to send out e-mailings, or snail-mailings, or hang neighborhood flyers, you want them to carry your web site link, but when prospects visit that central hub, how likely are you to get a call? If you’re not, you know what has to be done first. Look at your web site stats – lots of hits, few contacts? What visitors are telling you is that they came to your “open house” and never got out of the car. Whether it’s e-mail marketing, social networking, or other marketing formats, your site needs to reflect your overall marketing approach and core competencies, or you’re just throwing away your effort and dollars.

That’s what a lot of web sites look like. The phone number is correct, the home page is up and running, but no one’s really there. The lights aren’t on. The doors are locked. The parking lot is empty. In other words, there’s no sign of activity, of traffic, of use, or even of any real attention paid by the site owner. When you drive by two restaurants of the same kind, and one is packed, vibrant, thriving, and the other is empty, what do you think?

The point is that your site needs fresh, updated, dynamic content, frequently, consistently, in order to be of interest to visitors. And not content ripped off of the web, either. Do you really want to expose your company to liability for copyright violation? Besides, with duplicate content, google will bury you. Seriously. It needs to be original. Whether you handle it, or pay us to, your business needs a doorman standing right out front, inviting atmosphere, a little lighting, music, and mood, so to speak. And above all – above all – content. Content is king. Don’t be the tax code. Be the busy BBQ joint. You know the one.

Fair use is a legal concept that allows reproduction of copyrighted materials, under some circumstances, without asking permission from the author and without having to pay a fee for the use.

Fair use of images in your site: For example, if I decide to post an image of a famous illustration on my blog, so my readers have a point of reference for the work, while I share my thoughts about it, that’s OK as long as the resolution is significantly lower than the original. Also, I would have to link the image back to the website where I found it, to properly attribute the image to the source.

Fair use of written text in your site: With written texts, it’s all right if I quote a small excerpt of the text, and then reference the source and post the link of the website where it’s from (if the text is found on an actual website). That goes for snippets of news data too. But fair use would limit the re-posted amount of the text data, to only what is sufficient to make your point, and then crediting the source properly. If you really want to re-post a larger amount of the material, or the full text, you can always ask permission from the owner. Keep in mind, that search engines like Google, penalize for same or similar text. Too much duplicate content can get your site’s rankings lowered.

Using links in your site: While it’s usually not necessary to get permission to link to other web sites, you can still ask if you wish. Most corporate sites have terms of use already on their site, to avoid constant requests. Smaller site owners may not but, again, it’s really up to you whether you point to their site or not. Especially when the links are relevant to your content, there’s usually no question as to the propriety of linking to related content – most website owners welcome extra traffic. Keep in mind that too many outbound links, not balanced against enough original content, can lower your search engine rankings. Pages of links (portal pages) are usually not very helpful to business web sites.

Music, movies and e-book excerpts: These are properties that directly profit the artists/authors, so posting excessive excerpts (let alone the whole thing) online can open you to claims that you’re depriving the owner of income, and that can be damaging for a small business. Some music portals do have tracks posted, but samples are usually limited to only about 30 seconds or so. Including longer excerpts of copyrighted songs might be problematic. Other sites use legal loopholes or escape clauses, but these are likely to be unavailable to most businesses. Some e-books have free ‘first chapters’ circulating the net to get people hooked, but there may be limits on how much of those chapters you can include on your site, and in what context. Movies trailers are available on the web for promotions purposes, but other film excerpts may cause you difficulty, if the studio pursues it.

Fair use is not actually a clear-cut set of rules. There aren’t really set rules on what you can and can’t do – just effective precedents – it’s an area of ambiguity. The general idea that, as long as re-posting the work of other people doesn’t interfere with the value of the work or the interest of the owner, there’s no conflict with fair use. A bit of common sense, a smidgen of savvy, and you can use and share online media. The main thing is not to treat the web as your own warehouse of free content. That, faster than anything, can expose your business to liability.

Again, none of this should be construed as legal advice. We have no legal credentials, and offer this information as speculation, only.

Besides, competition is thinnest among those actually doing something about their marketing. Anyone can hang out a shingle, and sit around hoping for a nibble and a tug on their line. But investing a little time, energy, and attention in tackling the problem head on – targeting your audience, your niche, emphasizing what you have to offer, etc – these can mean that while others are eating cold sandwiches, you’re reeling in fish.

Marketing Tip: When your competitors have more experience, focus on your freshness and talent. When the other guys have more talent, hire talent.

With the rate of return for hand-delivered flyers being maybe 1.5%, you’re looking at a lot of leg work. With a really killer flyer, and a personal handshake, you might achieve 3%, so we’re not ruling that out. In fact, we’ll design the really killer flyer for you. However, if you’re not using the internet to do your marketing, you’re missing out on an ever growing audience and you risk your traditional marketing seeming, well, old-fashioned.

Marketing Tip: your hand-delivered flyer should compliment your web site in terms of style and content, and should include your web site address and e-mail address. I’ll sometimes hear people say, “I don’t give that information to my clients, because my clients prefer to use the phone.” How do you know? If you don’t give them the information, one thing’s certain, you’ll only get clients who use the phone. Likewise, if your web site hasn’t changed in ages, and is 100% template content, why would anyone respond to it. It’s not hard to study and graph the rise in internet use in all locales. If you’re ignoring it as a marketing venue, you’ll never know what you’re missing. Your competition will.

• Tons of bad internal links can substitute SEO for effective marketing. Don’t make that trade. Think before you link.
• Page titles should be bookmarkable, not just keyword-packed. Remember: be human! Titles should read like book spines.
• Keywords themselves are much more effective when they’re part of a natural, marketing style in your writing.
• Keywords, likewise, are not an excuse for static content. Dynamic content, if relevant and unique, is likely to be chock full of good keywords, anyway. The secret to keywords is words, in the first place.

The same goes for indirect search engine marketing – such as directories, social networking venues, and inbound links. These are important, when used effectively.

• Directories need to have good pagerank and, if you’re paying for a listing, consider spending that same money on real ad placement like Google adwords. What’s better – being part of a directory of your competitors, or outclassing competitors with better placement?
• Inbound links, likewise, are most effective when they’re relevant, and when they link to landing pages that are effectively marketed on web sites with significant page rank.
• Social networking is the wave of the future, but just making sure you appear as a blip in a few social networks can cost you real traffic. If you go in, like the first people AOL let out onto the open web, and dump your own spam into the network, people will make a point of ignoring you.
• Social networking also depends on social web sites – in other words, dynamic web sites. We’ve said a lot about that elsewhere at Market Moose, so we won’t preach it here. But you’ve heard us say it – if your site is an unchanging paperweight, it’s dead to the social networking world, all the more so if you flood it with spam links.

Search engine optimization, and internet marketing don’t consist of the lowest fruit, the shortest path, or the way of least effort and most return. They’re a process that involves integrity and real commitment, like all marketing. Just because it involves the internet, doesn’t make it cheap, simple, or consisting of obvious gimmicks. Marketing is a professional endeavour. Above all else, keep that in mind, and you’ll think twice about jumping at tricks and you’ll be more effective over a longer time than your competitors who deal in short term spikes.

Proceed according to a professional internet marketing plan. If you don’t have one, consult with a professional. Before you shell out money for a “keyword bonanza” or “seo secrets” or “internet marketing power house techniques”, take the time and invest the though in building a solid, realistic, long-term approach. This market – the internet – is THE market, going forward. You wouldn’t put your real estate logo on the butts of cheerleaders, would you? Actually, for a one-time stunt, it could be useful, but you’d want to weigh the risk of market loss with the glory of publicity. In the same way, take your internet marketing very seriously. Your image on the net will last longer and go farther than anything you put on a flyer or a postcard. Treat it right, and it’ll stay with you throughout the life of your company, and pay serious dividends.

Again, a little advice:

• Be professional about your internet marketing.
• Consult a professional internet marketing consultant.
• Build a professional internet marketing plan.
• Make marketing decisions with thought and intelligence.

Happy marketing, from Market Moose – the Internet Marketing Consultants. Loose the Moose!

These days, static sites are getting wiped off the search engine rankings by sites with dynamic content – sites that are updated frequently – most especially, blogs.

Blogging tools require no special knowledge. If you can write an e-mail, you can write a blog post. The hurdle is not how, it’s the will to do it. The keys to the will in this case are several:

First: you have to accept the fact that the old days are gone, and putting up an internet billboard and just waiting for people to come to you is like fishing in your backyard swimming pool. Invest and hope nets very few fish. In other words, you can make no progress, unless you accept that the world really has changed. Has changed. Past tense. If you cannot get past this point, you will be stuck, like Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman, relying on a handshake in an era that has long since gone by. The hunger, the craving for fresh content has made static sites seem like reading the same newspaper every morning at breakfast – it just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Second: you have to accept the fact that other people truly are making hay with dynamic content – with blogs. This amounts to accepting that, by providing consistently fresh content, people elsewhere are driving business traffic and drawing in new customers. In other words, you must not dismiss as irrelevant the news that quite ordinary people (almost exclusively ordinary people) are using the internet to effectively market and grow their businesses. If you maintain disbelief here, you cannot hope to use the internet effectively yourself. While this may be comforting, because it demands no further activity, and it may compel you to throw money at experts like ourselves, and hope that’s enough, you’re not truly committed to marketing your business, beyond dropping flyers from a helicopter into the internet. The returns will be commensurate with the strategy.

Third: you must accept that blogging was invented so that people with no technical knowledge or background, and no skill in web building, could post content as easily as writing an e-mail. In other words, you have to resign yourself to the fact that it’s stoltifyingly easy. If you maintain the myth that internet marketing is for experts, you will certainly alleviate yourself of any felt responsibility for marketing your business, and you will also alleviate your prospects of any interest in your marketing efforts. They will find those enterprising persons in point two (above) who have no more knowledge or skill or talent or expertise than you, but only have slightly more courage and clarity. They will find those with the will.

Yes, we’re being quite frank, here. That’s one of the keys to our success. We’ll tell you the truth, when others demur. We’ll be straight with you, where others offer you Camelot for the price of swamp land, and sell you swamp land at Camelot prices. One of the reasons we have loyal clients is our willingness to push back, to say the hard thing, to nudge you into the next phase in your marketing success.

Finally: if you have truly accepted the reality of the situation, you must make a decision about whether your business is worth the five minutes a day it will take you to maintain an interesting blog. If not, then you must accept the results of the first three points:

• a marketing strategy from internet past, not internet present
• a marketing strategy that discourages today’s hottest sources of prospects
• a marketing strategy that is less than ordinary, and requires no ongoing effort

On the other hand, if you are willing to update your marketing strategy, willing to attract the prospects you aren’t currently attracting, and willing to spend 5min/day or so being fairly ordinary to accomplish these, then blogging can become the beating heart of a business marketing plan that is able to unlock a host of marketing tools, like:

• powerful social networking
• effective e-mail marketing
• enhanced search engine results

It’s largely up to you. We can build your site, and we can help with your branding, style, content, navigation, lead capture, search engine optimization, and more.

From there, we can advise you on how to make that 5min/day really count for your business. If you want to reach the next step after launching a site you can be proud of, blogging is an important starting place. Remember:

A business that isn’t growing, is dying.

A business that isn’t marketing, is shrinking, not growing.

and lastly:

It can be hard to believe, at first, that it helps. Someone asked, recently, “You mean people read blogs and then call you?” Yes, that’s one way. Blogs help search engines find and rank your site higher. You get high plusses for unique, original, relevant, and frequently updated content. People whose sites never change, start sinking in the rankings of key searches. You will come up in more searches (it’s not just about rankings), which means more people find your site when searching for relevant information and discussion. Eventually, a readership develops. If you rarely update your blog, of course, you’ll never experience these benefits. It’s like owning a neon sign and never turning on the power. It’s hard for people of my generation to believe that things work this way now, but they do. That’s why most major companies and organizations have turned to blogging, and often run a number of blogs that draw attention to their services.

I’m not technical!: Neither is blogging. Blogging is no harder. and not very different, than sending an e-mail. It’s type and save. For many people, blogging has not been tried and found too hard, it’s simply not been tried, because there’s not enough belief in increasing your business. But if that’s not you, it takes about 10 minutes a day for a consistent time to make an impact. What are you waiting for?

The Keys to Blogging Well are:
Consistency: Blog 10-minutes a day. If you absolutely can’t, then blog every other day. If every 3rd day is all you can do, it’s all you can do. But putting up a blog you intent to update once a month is just going to frustrate visitors who expect to see something new from you.
Relevancy: It’s all well and good to blog about your cats. But relevancy scores big with search engines and with clients. Blog about the local market, your industry, financial issues, advice for buyers/sellers/borrowers/homeowners. Blog what you think about, what you know, what’s on your mind and, if you do that consistently, you’ll attract other people who are thinking about it too.
Uniqueness: Don’t copy and paste other people’s content into your blog. For one thing, that’s stealing, and other businesses tend to take a dim view. For another, search engines penalize you for duplicate content, so you’re just wasting space and making it worse. You don’t have to be hemingway to write a paragraph on what’s frustrating about the market right now, or answering a question that you were asked today, or explaining why a certain kind of mortgage is better than another, or discussing whether it’s a good time to buy, a good time to sell, or both. Maybe you write just to give hope. But for goodness sake, if you can answer a question on the telephone, you can write down what you said on your blog. Work it!

That’s it. You can google search business blogs, blog growth, blogs and search engine rankings, and any number of other phrases to see what’s going on. It’s like health – it’s not about whether we know what’s good for us; it’s whether we have the will. In fact, this is about the health of your business.

1. A specialist with direct access to the back end of your site can make improvements aimed at increasing your searches and search engine placement.
2. Both search engines and humans want original, relevant, dynamic content. Blogging is at the heart of this. Do you blog? If not, you’re missing out on free marketing. Blog, and share your posts in social media.
3. You can also contact the search engine itself and pay for a service like Google Adwords to ensure high placement in particular searches.

All of these are recommended.

Myths to Watch Out For

What about services that promise to increase your rankings but don’t need username/password access to your site to do it, and don’t plan to make changes to your site? Frankly, for the most part, these are just smoke and can actually reduce the human traffic to your site, while increasing hits from automated software robots, and even driving spam. All these telephone representatives can really do is type your domain into a software program, let a computer submit your pages to hundreds of search engines (most of which aren’t even relevant), and submit individual pages to the big ones like Google and Yahoo (which actually can cause your rankings to be lowered).

Companies that pretend they don’t need administrative access to your site:

• cannot do back-end optimization – building a truly competitive set of meta-tags (the hidden tags behind each of your pages)
• cannot insert the special file and header that are required for Google and Yahoo to map your site properly
• cannot do front-end optimization of your content for search engines
• cannot optimize your navitation, marketing content, lead capture, and visual design to convert hits into contacts, so your money isn’t wasted

Take a fraction of the expensive fees you’d spend on these promises and have a web builder do a one-time customization/optimization of your site. Keep it updated frequently (asking an internet marketing consultant to explain what’s effective). Then invest in the far less expensive Google Adwords service and, in our experience, you’ll really get your money’s worth.

What about services that promise to get you on the front page, or guarantee a certain ranking?

It’s mythology. Anyone can get you on the front page if you search under your own company name. How many companies are named exactly the same thing? But that’s for people that already know you. If you’re trying to grow your business, what matters is coming up at all in a variety of searches that real prospects will do, like “Macon, Georgia Home Loan” or “Condo in South Beach” or “Appraiser Las Vegas”. That’s a whole different ball game. And the truth is that no one except the search engine itself can guarantee you a certain ranking in a certain search, because no one controls that except the search engine itself. In fact, Google so closely guards it’s formulae for determining rankings that anyone who promises to have it down pat would have to stolen the most closely guarded secret of our time, and how long do you think they’d really be in business?

The truth is there is a lot of MYTHOLOGY out there, and a lot of outdated knowledge. It’s important to have someone who stays up to date and doesn’t promise you the moon, but still can deliver a high level of optimization and make valid recommendations for what changes need to be made. You really can climb the rankings, if you follow good advice. But instant solutions often don’t last a month, if they last a day, and more often than not don’t work at all.

Real Help with SEO

• Content is King. The more unique, relevant, original written content (text) you have, the better.
• Blogging generates content. Getting your blog off the ground is a powerful way to improve search engine optimization, and attract people to your services.
• Social media. If you’re blogging, you’re creating short snippets of original content on a regular basis. Take excerpts from these and post them with a link to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Twitter will mostly manage itself, if you don’t hide your profile. With Facebook, add any contacts you make, as you make them.
• Conversion. It’s not just getting people to your site (traffic), it’s turning those site visits into contacts (calls, emails, online applications, etc). You need effective marketing  material and lead capture. A solid internet marketing consultant can help.
• Photos actually can help. In the case of photos with links, there are three hidden tags that can actually help it improve search engine optimization. However, you may need an SEO expert to fully optimize and achieve the value you need from images on your site.
• Inbound links (people linking to you) helps tremendously. You achieve these by producing consistantly interesting content, and sharing it in social media.

We’re Market Moose internet marketing. If you need expertise in any of these areas, we’re happy to help.

What’s changed?

Marketing, for one thing. People aren’t interested in hearing about you (or me). That’s right, I said it. People are interested in what they’re interested in. What the internet, specifically the web, has done, is to cut out most of the traditional middle man opportunities. People have direct access to an unthinkable vast database of pretty much whatever they’re interested in. We either pitch to that, or we’re pitching to the wind. Web sites that go on and on about my company, myself, my favorite color, are too narcissistic for a web 2.0 marketing environment. They won’t just fade away, they’ll plummet in terms of rankings, leads, and attention. Sure, one can pull off a temporary boost with a gimmick or two tucked behind the code, but Google is getting smarter, and it’s web crawlers are reading your site just like a human would, moreso every day, and reacting to the irrelevant content and the fancy tricks just as much as to the content.

The other thing that’s changed is that no one gives a hoot about static web sites anymore. Again, yes, I said it. No one cares about our 5-page treatise that never changes. If we want static data, we’ll get it on an mp3 and listen to it in the car, or from a keychain-sized pocket device. The words, “I won’t blog. I just won’t.” are the death knell of small business sites that intend to have any effect these days. It’s all about dynamic content. And not cut and paste content that’s ripped off from elsewhere – besides sending your google rank plummeting, it’ll just bore your prospects off to your competitors. What people want, whether we like it or not, wish it away or not, is something that’s going to take work from the site owner – those actually involved in the business operations: visitors want original, relevant, frequently-updated content. Google wants the same thing.

So don’t spend 16 hours this weekend hanging flyers, at 1% rate of return. Spend 5min/day, every day, keeping your blog current. A little dab’ll do ya, as they say. It really just takes 5minutes. This post is 10minutes, and already you’re probably getting bored, right? So to sum it up. It’s not the amount of work that matters, or that you and I really care about. It’s the kind of work. If we’re still basically using yesterday’s marketing techniques, face it – we’re old. And the only cure isn’t more cowbell – it’s to update our technique. Get a new hair cut from the barber, buy a different kind of shirt than you normally wear, eat something you never have, and think outside the box that is your web site,  your marketing plan, and any self-imposed limits on your business growth. If we want traffic from outside the box, leads from outside the lines, qualified visitors from beyond the “about us” page, then business owners have to change the way they work, when it comes to their marketing. We’ll have to settle for spending less money than interest, less time than focus, and we’ll have to learn a new thing.

Now if that isn’t motivation enough to get started, leave a comment here, and I’ll try harder. You and I are like our businesses: if we’re not growing, we’re dying.

Oh, and one last thing. Yeah, I know I was born with a circuit board in my mouth. But that’s no excuse. If you can read this, and you write a reasonably comprehensible e-mail, you’ve got the basic tools you need to market your business for years to come. You and I may not have gone to school for this. Marketing can be fun, frankly, once we get past the curmudgeonly resistance that comes with the onset of years. So take a pill from me – contact me if you want some help kicking it off – meanwhile, it’s your 5minutes to think about your business growth. How are you spending it today?