It’s not the end all answer, but it’s quick, painless, and free – a way to get your name in front of your local audience. It tends to result in posting a special offer or something that promotes the business. While there’s nothing wrong with that … other than the obvious loss of income from price discounting … we may get better results if we have a little fun with our audience.

Here’s a recent example:

My husband and I rescued a tiny, frail chipmunk a few weeks ago. It was dehydrated and hungry, and perked right up after some water and a little peanut butter. We attempted to reintroduce it to our backyard a couple of days later, but it clearly wasn’t going to work, and we had already grown attached to this really cute little rodent.

Meanwhile, my husband started posting pictures and updates about Chippy on his Facebook wall – and oh my, the response to those updates was amazing! Not just on Facebook, but when Gerald is out taking photos, people stop to ask him about Chippy! Last night, by popular request, he created a Facebook page for Chippy.

Just 12 hours later, that page had over 40 followers.

As a marketer, I’m always looking for ways to help businesses connect with new customers. So, is there a takeaway from a Facebook page not related to sales for gaining followers quickly? (Hopefully, your target audience includes people.

I think people are drawn to Chippy because it’s a feel good story/life to follow, and in this day and age, those feel good stories are few and far between. Personally, I wait for photo updates from Jerry every day on Chippy.” ~ Kristine Feldmann on Facebook

As business owners, we need to remember that it’s not about us. Whether our target audience is moms, dads, kids, seniors, or other businesses, it’s always, without fail, comprised of people.

How can you interest them? What will they respond to? How can we engage them in a fun, maybe offbeat way to get their attention?

A.I.D.A. is a marketing acronym for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. It’s the basic principle behind all effective advertising copywriting. Notice that attention and interest precede desire.

Facebook pages aren’t about direct advertising, but they clearly draw attention to your business. The acronym is still, if not more, relevant in social media. What can you do today to attract the attention of your target audience?

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about chipmunks, believe it or not. Click here to read 5 Small Business Tips from a Chipmunk

Your website should be significant to search engines. Do you know why that matters?

At least 80% of all new traffic is the result of a search on Google, Yahoo, Bing, or one of the lesser known search engines. People type in what they’re looking for, and you want those words connected to your website.

Where you rank on the search engine results page (SERP) depends on multiple factors. There are on-site things to consider, as well as off-site. Today’s post deals only with some of the on-site factors.

Do you know what keyword phrases people would use when they’re looking for what you offer?

We use a combination of common sense, local geographic terms (for local businesses), Google Insights for Search, and the Market Samurai keyword research tool (for the heavy lifting).

It’s not enough to simply guess which terms people might be searching for. It’s important to do the research to learn what terms deliver traffic and what terms have too much competition to reasonably pursue.

It’s also important to understand what the competition is up to.

• How is it that they’re ranking first in Google on your preferred search terms?
• What do you need to do to outrank them?

Research can unveil all of this and give you a leg up on your competition.

Are your keyword phrases used in your META tags, including page titles, description, and keywords?

Google isn’t the only game in town. The other search engines still respond to META tags.

The most important on-page locations for your keyword phrases are the unique titles on each page. Now when I say ‘title,’ I’m not referring to the bold text at the top of your page, like your banner. In older browsers, the title was obvious at the top of the screen, above the web page.

Newer tabbed browsers do a pretty good job of hiding the titles, but they still matter to the search engines. Of equal importance, page titles become the clickable link in the SERPs. Unique page titles belong in the header of each page of your website, and won’t necessarily show up on the page itself.

Are your keyword phrases woven into the headlines, body text, hyperlinks, and lists on your web pages?

This weaving of keyword phrases is an art, not to be confused with spamming your poor reader with nonsense – while you think you’re writing for the search engines. Search engines can’t read, they just follow the traffic. Just make sure your keyword phrase is in there a time or two and forget anything you may have heard about keyword density.

Write for your reader, period. Need some help with your website copy?

Next up in this series: Link building

Related Post: Make Your Website Work FOR You – Part 1

This was originally posted in December 2006. I went back over it and realized you could really benefit from this information and several others on the same topic. I think you’ll enjoy my revisions of those earlier posts, and wanted to share them with you in my latest series, starting today. Let me know how this perspective influences the way you look at your business website! ~Shari

Effective Results-Driven Websites

Is your website producing leads or sales? As many as you’d like? Or is it a monthly expense with little to nothing to show for itself?

Effective online marketing isn’t mysterious. If your website isn’t performing as needed, there’s a reason for it. Let’s look at some common reasons that websites perform poorly. We’ll break this down over several posts, one reason at a time.

An Undefined or Un-communicated Website Purpose:

Whether your website’s purpose is to provide information, collect leads or sell product, realize that it’s only one tool in your marketing arsenal … but one of the most important.

So let’s start there, what exactly is the purpose of your website? How does it help you meet your business goals?

Without a clearly defined purpose, even the most highly promoted website will not succeed. Have a fresh set of eyes review your website and ask, “Does my website accomplish this purpose?”

Does it answer the questions your visitor wants to know?

Perform a Page-by-Page Analysis

Next, take a look at your landing pages. If the purpose of your landing page is to create leads, does everything on that page work toward answering the questions of a prospect? Does it match the stage of the buying process of your prospect?

For example, we recently rewrote content for a b2b client after realizing that the copy was misaligned with the sales cycle. The old copy had a tone of convincing the prospect that the product was needed, but viewers of this page would not have needed convincing. They were ready to buy and looking for the best solution from the best company. Different purposes – totally different copy!

Authenticity:

There’s not one single area of business or of life that cannot be improved by aligning purpose with practice. My purpose here continues to be to bring you useful, actionable marketing tips. Staying true to that purpose is part of being authentic – another value important to thinking visitors to your website.

Think about the websites you visit, the newsletters you subscribe to, and the businesses or individuals on Facebook and Twitter that you enjoy following. Are there one or two that stand out, whose updates you don’t want to miss, whose emails you ALWAYS open? Why is that?

For me, those emails resonate with my values or provide information that I really do need – and they stay on target with authenticity. It starts on the website and permeates their entire online presence.

If you’d like help reviewing your website, or are ready for a website redesign or even fresh copy, give me a call at 920-364-0261 or visit our website marketing strategies page at Zero To Sixty Marketing.

Next up in this series, we’ll be talking about search engine relevance. If you’re not receiving our email newsletter, be sure to subscribe!

Related Posts:
Is Your Website Invisible?
What is Your Website Visitor Looking For?

Forget about SEO, blogging, gaining back links, and posting to Facebook and Twitter for a moment. If you want to draw visitors to your physical storefront, you need to focus on ‘local’ first. Get the local part right, and the rest will begin to make sense. All paths will lead directly to your door.

Is your business visible on the map?

Navigate to Google Maps and type your business category and location into the search box. Does your business show up? Is it at or near the top of the list? If so, click on your listing. How does it look? Has it been owner-verified?

Now go to Bing’s Business Portal and Yahoo Local and do the same thing. Answer the same questions.

Those are the big three, but what about Yelp.com, MerchantCircle.com, Angie’s List, SuperPages.com, Local.com, Kudzu, Manta, InsiderPages, and do you know if you’re showing up on mobile and GPS enabled devices?

As a local business owner, you need to be highly visible on ALL the maps. Your listings need to be accurate, consistent, and present you in the best possible light.

Many local directory listings function as external supporting websites – providing not only your business name, address and phone number, but also links to your website, your social media profiles, third party reviews, even image and video uploads, and the ability to post blogs and coupons.

The upside is that the opportunity to increase your online visibility is huge. The downside is that I don’t know of one single business owner who has the time or the patience to make sure he’s listed properly in all the local directories.

That’s why we’ve developed our local directory listing packages. You can be visible wherever your customers are searching, without having to make the time to do it all yourself.

For more information, read What Do Search Engines Know About Your Business?

Search engines index content – web pages, not domain names. Yes, your choice of domain IS important, but for SEO purposes, only the domain your website sits on matters. Extra domains pointed to the site don’t really hold any content, so there’s nothing on them for a search engine to index. Therefore, they have NO impact on SEO … unless you’ve pointed those extra domains to your site without a proper 301 redirect. In that case, those extra domains can hurt your rankings.

If your site shows up on both mydomain-one.com and mydomain-two.com and all the pages work regardless of which domain has been selected, you’ve got a duplicate content problem that needs to be fixed ASAP.

So what can you do with one or more extra keyword-specific domain names?

1. Go ahead and forward it to a specific page on your site, then use it with an Adwords campaign.
2. Point it to WordPress.com, Blogger.com or Posterous.com and use it as a secondary home for your content. These sites tend to be indexed quickly, and if you post quality content to them, they’ll eventually provide a payoff – offering the potential of high quality links that you control and can point toward your main site. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but well worth the effort.
3. Use your extra domain for a mini-site to promote a well-defined niche within your product / service line or to promote an event or information product.

Bad SEO practices can hurt your efforts. Not just for a day, either. Be sure you know what you’re doing before you waste a lot of time working in the wrong direction.

Have you had to correct a bad SEO decision? How long did it affect you? Don’t be shy – leave us a comment and tell others how to avoid making the same mistake!

If you’ve never done so, NOW might be a good time to head on over to places.google.com, yelp.com, yahoo.com and bing.com to see whether or not your business is already listed and collecting reviews.

If you’re already listed, either take the next step and ‘claim’ your listing on each site – taking care to fill out each profile completely – or enter ALL your profile information ONE time using our new local business listing service. Choose the latter and you’ll be added to over 350 local directories AND we’ll help you claim your listing on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yelp. How’s that for a time-saver? See our Local Business Listing page for details.

What does this have to do with monitoring your brand online? Well, if your business has received a review – whether good or bad – wouldn’t you like to know about it? Both Yelp and Google accept reviews on unclaimed business listings, and unless you’re monitoring your business name, you may never know about it.

The good news is that if you claim your listing, you’ll receive regular updates about activity on it, AND you’ll be able to respond to any comments or reviews.

You’ll also want to set up a Google alert on your business name, and Social Mention alerts  on your real name, business name, and any names you use for social media profiles.

Are there other tools you recommend for monitoring your brand online? Please let us know in the comments.

The biggest hurdle for any email marketer is to make it to an inbox. Second to that is to have your message opened. Before you can get subscriber attention on that special offer of yours, spend some time working on that subject line and testing for spam.

Your subject line should be convincing, but not full of hype. Stay within customer norms when it comes to terminology used by your industry or niche. Words like ‘Free’ and ‘Buy Now’ can seem appropriate, but are often flagged as spam and can get lost or dumped in junk mail.

When a subscriber sees your email they should see:

• your brand identification
• accurate brief description of contents
• words that trigger a response

Really focus on those elements and you’ll have a much better chance of getting in, and opened.

If you already have an email account on Yahoo, Google, or Bing, go ahead and make sure you’re set up on all three locations. Then send a test email from your email service to yourself on those search engines and to your MS Outlook. If you’re ending up in spam filters, go back and try again.

Your subject line is not the only reason you may end up in spam filters. If your emails don’t get opened up when you send, eventually their inboxes will pick up on that and revert it to junk mail. Make sure your content is really nailing information that your customer looks forward to.

I talk more about this in the Email Success Series. Take a minute to check it out, and make sure you sign up to get access to all of the free audios and teachings. Susan Hamilton Copywriting and Zero To Sixty Marketing have developed this free, no-strings attached series to teach you exactly what you need to know to develop your own email campaigns from start to finish.

Here’s a link to a page with more information, including a sign up form.

Email Success Series

Was this helpful? Make sure you leave us your comments or questions and we’ll get right back to you.

What’s a business blog, anyway?

Ideally, your small business blog is the beginning of a two-way conversation with your readers because it’s interactive by nature. You, the blogger, post fresh information on a regular basis. Your readers subscribe via an email form or by RSS feed, and they’re notified of every new article you post. But they can do more than just view your content. Your readers have the ability to comment or ask questions.

How can a blog help your business?

1. A blog is an excellent customer education platform.
2. Readers subscribe because they want to hear what you have to say. It’s the beginning of a relationship, where your prospect says “tell me more.”
3. A well-written, regularly updated blog is a credibility builder because it positions you as an expert on your topic.
4. Your blog can/should be a resource, where visitors will come to your blog because you are the source of information they need.
5. Search engines love regularly updated content. Each blog post represents an opportunity to publish relevant information that your audience is searching for. You just can’t get that from a static website.

A blog doesn’t have to be limited to words on a page. In fact, it’s better if you mix it up a bit by posting short audios, videos, photos, and slide shows. Written blog posts don’t need to be full-length, journalistic articles either. The only rule if you’re writing to a business audience, is that you remember who your audience is.

• What will help them?
• What will they find interesting?
• What will they respond to?

Our favorite blogging software is WordPress. It comes in two flavors:

• the free WordPress.com, where you can set up a blog quickly on their server, and
• the self-hosted WordPress site, where we install it on your hosting account.

We favor the second option because it gives you more control and greater customization options. Those customization options include amazing theme choices, choc-full of helpful nuances for small businesses to increase their chance for successful marketing online.

All of our Simple Hosting accounts come with a properly configured, safety-optimized WordPress installation. Purchase during the month of March, and we’ll also throw in the premium business blogging theme of *your choice from the Standard Themes collection at the iThemes – Theme Store

That’s a $79.95 value!

Don’t delay! Our subscribers know these offers don’t come around often. Take advantage of building your successful business website NOW. Sign up today to receive your *free premium theme when you purchase our Simple Hosting package!

Would you like more information on how to build a better business website? Sign up for our informational email series that walks you through exactly what you need to know about complete website functionality.

*Offer limited to premium themes from the Standard Collection at the iThemes – Theme Store, and does not include Builder.

You can Google your competitors and take a close look at what they’re doing, but an easier, more effective method is pull this information in via Market Samurai. If you haven’t yet done so, I highly recommend you download your free trial version here.

Market Samurai offers several modules, each with a specific use to accomplish a specific goal. The one we use to evaluate your online competition is the SEO Competition module.

We plug your keyword phrase into this module and it returns the top 10 results for the phrase. But you can get that from Google, right? Not so fast. Remember the personalization we spoke of previously? This concept still applies to any search conducted from your browser.

Information returned by Market Samurai includes the domain age, page rank, incoming links, back links to the page, back links to the domain, how many links are from the coveted .gov or .edu domains, whether they’re listed in DMOZ or Yahoo’s paid directory, whether they’ve optimized the title, URL, description and header tags, and how long it’s been since the domain was indexed. All useful info, but that’s not all. You also get a PR analysis – how many of the links coming into the site are from high PR sites, and an anchor text analysis – what was the text used for the links to the site.

Now add the URL of your site to pull the same information from it – an easy, color coded comparison – and you can easily see where to start working on your site.

For that plumbing site example, we learned that the top competitor had high authority links inbound from the Better Business Bureau, Yellow Page advertising, and certain directories (both free and paid). A little bit of sleuth work helped immensely.

Broken links can pop up anywhere. Maybe you’ve shared a photo from Flickr on your post, then the photographer removed the picture. Maybe you’ve copied and pasted a link wrong … adding a second http://. And quite possibly you’ve received comments from sites that no longer exist. I’ve just scanned this website and found each of those instances and more. They’ve all been removed – and there were a lot of broken links. How embarrassing!

You also want to pay attention to how you’re leaving links to your site. The link to this site’s home page is http://expressmarketingmemo.com/. Notice the trailing slash. We all tend to omit it because the link will work with or without it. But that’s only because your page is being redirected behind the scenes (we hope*). Write the link right and no redirection is necessary. Make it easy for those spiders!

You have two options for finding broken links on your site:
* The W3C Link Checker and
* Xenu’s Link Sleuth

The W3C Link Checker is done online – no downloads necessary. Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a free download. I found it to be more powerful and easier to use, especially since you can export the results to a TAB delimited format and import into Excel. That makings fixing the errors a bit easier.

You’ll want to fix everything that returns a status of ‘server error,’  ‘not found,’ ‘forbidden request,’ ‘no connection,’ and ‘no such host.’ Here’s how: Each entry in Xenu is accompanied by a title. Open up your ‘posts’ page in WordPress and search on that title. Remove or fix each broken link, and click update. That’s all there is to it.

*  If your site is not set up properly, your home page might show up as an actual page on each of these extensions:

• www.homepage.com AND homepage.com
• www.homepage.com/AND homepage.com/
• www.homepage.com/index.html AND homepage.com/index.html/

Believe it or not, Google sees each of those extensions as actual pages and you suffer the consequences of what they perceive as duplicate content on your site. If this is occurring on your site, I can help. Please get in touch with me via my contact form.

Related Off-Site Article:

Xenu’s Link Sleuth – More than Just a Broken Links Finder